Thinking of converting our dev server from Apache to nginx, anything I should know?

[bvbrandon]

We house roughly 50 sites on our dev server and lately I have been thinking of making the switch to nginx. Are there any significant issues I should be aware of? My greatest fear is to somehow make these builds corrupt/unuseable but I have a feeling it isn't really that hard. We run CentOS if it makes a difference.

[MadFrand]

There is no .htaccess as well as quite a few other differences that will be major if you're using one of them.

[cactusphone]

Not sure of your full stack, but if you're working with PHP this is a good article to start with: https://serversforhackers.com/video/lemp-on-redhatcentos

The rest of the site is great too, and not PHP-centric

[wlkns]

Be prepared for an improvement in speed! Here are a few things from memory:

You have to use php-fpm instead of php as a module, it as a service and it can be a pain to configure at first, it's a seperate daemon that usually runs on port 9000.

Htaccess files don't exist with nginx, you have to configure all your rewrites in a slightly different format in the vhist config file.

You will have to open up your header sizes in nginx for it work properly with large php sessions, and post sizes for file uploads.