How to Install Prosper202 on Nginx powered VPS

It has been nearly a ten months since my post of recommended unmanaged VPS for Prosper202. I was planning to give you guys a Prosper202 installation tutorial sooner than this. I didn’t have time to do it. But today, I’m going to give you a step by step tutorial on how to install Prosper202 on your Nginx powered VPS.

You’re probably thinking, what’s a Nginx powered VPS? Nginx is a web server, just like Apache. But only faster than Apache. After installing Prosper202 with this configuration, you’ll be able to track few million hits a day without any issues.

Now before I start, I’m going to assume few things. I’m going to assume that you’ve already bought a VPS with Ubuntu 12.04 as it’s OS, you know how to connect to your VPS with Putty, the SSH client, your domain is pointing to your VPS (You should check your registrar’s knowledge base for this) And you’ve installed Nginx, PHP and MySQL on your VPS. If you haven’t done any of those, you must stop right here and complete all four of them in that order before going any further.

So let’s start by installing ZIP. You’ll need it to uncompress Prosper202 installation files later.

sudo apt-get install zip

You may add 10-15 other sites to this VPS, each one of them will need it’s own directory to keep it’s files. So let’s give Prosper202 it’s directory. And also a directory for it’s logs, make sure you replace example.com with your domain name or subdomain.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/htdocs/ /var/www/example.com/logs/

Navigate to that directory,

cd /var/www/example.com/htdocs/

Execute following commands one by one to download Prosper202 installation package, unzip it, move files to root directory of domain and give file ownership to Nginx.

sudo wget -O prosper202.zip http://my.tracking202.com/clickserver/download/latest
sudo unzip prosper202.zip
sudo rm prosper202.zip
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com/

Since everything is in place now, next step is to create a MySQL database. Login to MySQL as root user,

mysql -u root -p

Logged in to MySQL, running following command will create a full privileged MySQL user ‘db_user’ with password ‘db_pass’. You should set your own values before executing this command.

grant all privileges on *.* to db_user@localhost identified by "db_pass";

And following command will create a database named ‘db_name’. Make changes and run the command. Please make a note of these information as you’ll need it later.

create database db_name;

Now exit MySQL.

quit

Now you need to create a Nginx configuration file for your site to let Nginx know that you need all requests to example.com to be redirected to it’s root directory. So let’s create a new file,

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

Paste following configurations to the file with necessary changes to the domain name.

server {
        server_name example.com www.example.com;

	access_log   /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;
	error_log    /var/log/nginx/example.com.error.log;

        root /var/www/example.com/htdocs;
        index index.php;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args; 
        }

        location ~ .php$ {
                include fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        }
}

Hit Ctrl+X to close the file. Give following command to enable the virtual host.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Now reload Nginx,

sudo service nginx reload

Last step is to make some changes to php configuration file. Open php.ini in nano text editor,

sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

Search for following line (Ctrl+W),

short_open_tag = Off

Delete the ; from the beginning of the line if there’s any. Change Off to On.

Now search for ‘date.timezone =’, remove ; from the beginning if there’s any. Add your timezone to the file. it will look like below,

date.timezone = US/Pacific

hit Ctrl+X to close the file and you’re good to go.

Restarting PHP5 will apply above changes to the server.

sudo service php5-fpm restart

Open your domain a browser window. If you’ve done everything correctly, you’ll see Prosper202 web installer. Provide what it asks from you and you’ll have your own Prosper202 installation in less than 5 minutes.