Engintron (Nginx) on cPanel

Engintron (Nginx) on cPanel

Introduction:

Regarding the Nginx installation, we strongly recommended installing Engintron to manage the Nginx on the server.

Nginx is a powerful open-source web server that was built to scale websites to millions of visitors. cPanel is the leading hosting control panel worldwide.

Engintron integrates Nginx into cPanel so you can enjoy the amazing performance for your sites, without having to sacrifice important hosting features found in cPanel.

Engintron for cPanel/WHM is the easiest way to integrate Nginx on your cPanel/WHM server. Engintron will improve the performance & web serving capacity of your server while reducing CPU/RAM load at the same time. It does that by installing & configuring the popular Nginx web server to act as a reverse caching proxy for static files (like CSS, JS, images, etc.) with an additional micro-cache layer to significantly improve the performance of dynamic content generated by CMSs like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal as well as forum software like vBulletin, phpBB, SMF or e-commerce solutions like Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop and others.

 

Why Should you use NGINX in your cPanel Server?

cPanel uses the Apache webserver to serve websites by default. Apache however is not known to perform well under heavy web traffic (especially traffic spikes) and it’s also CPU/RAM hungry. So how can you mitigate these issues? The answer is simple: by deploying Nginx, another popular web server software, in front of Apache. Nginx acts as a web traffic proxy, directly serving all static assets like CSS, JS, images, etc. by default, instead of Apache. This drops significantly the CPU/RAM resources consumed by Apache, leaving your server with more available resources for other tasks or, better still, with room for more websites to host.

 

Why is Engintron a better solution compared to other NGINX (or performance related) plugin for cPanel

There are 10 key differences when comparing Engintron with other Nginx installers for cPanel.

1. It works as it should and it works universally. You install it and ALL your cPanel websites will get accelerated, even the slowest ones. Not only that, your serving capacity will increase tremendously. Simple Apache Benchmark (ab) tests reveal a phenomenal increase in concurrent requests served per second, from just 3-300 in Apache to 15,000-20,000 or even more using Nginx via Engintron. It’s our carefully crafted Nginx proxy configuration that does all the magic. And it requires literally almost zero maintenance.
2. Engintron is a single shell script (weighing only a few KBs) that installs all required software (to make Nginx work as intended) from the official software package vendors’ repositories. Both installation and updates are very fast (they take only a few seconds).
   
3. since we’re using the official repositories for Nginx, all Engintron software is updated whenever cPanel (or the server’s software) is updated. So you essentially set it and forget it. Whenever you perform “yum update” or “dnf update” from the terminal or upgrade the server’s software from within WHM, Nginx will be updated if a new release is available. If something is changed on Engintron and you need to re-install it or a new version of Engintron is released, you simply install it on top of the previous installation, either from the terminal or using the Engintron WHM app. You don’t need to uninstall it first like other Nginx plugins for cPanel require you to do so before upgrading!
4. you can safely uninstall Engintron and it will revert your entire system to how it was before you installed Engintron. Simple as that. This means you can try Engintron and if you don’t like it or you find it doesn’t fit your needs, you can simply uninstall it. Your system will revert to how it was before. Period.
5. It has an amazingly simple yet practical app dashboard inside WHM with all the basic controls for Nginx, Apache, MySQL, the option to edit all important configuration files for these services, and even some handy utilities that make Engintron the dashboard in cPanel for your day-to-day sysadmin tasks. Think of it as your cPanel server’s mission control. And did we mention you can easily update Engintron from within WHM? Yeap! You even get update notifications when a new version is available.
6. It’s Cloudflare friendly. Because both CloudFlare and Engintron use Nginx as a reverse caching proxy, unless we configure Nginx in cPanel to properly act as the secondary proxy (after CloudFlare of course), chances are that CloudFlare will freak out and serve your sites with 10xx errors. So, if you have any domains hosted on your cPanel server that use Cloudflare for their CDN, you just set your server IPs inside your “custom_rules” Nginx configuration file (the file is commented for your help) and just restart Nginx for the changes to take effect. All this is done entirely inside WHM of course.
7. It doesn’t require manual Nginx/Apache vhost synchronization when adding new domains via cPanel. That’s why you essentially “set it and forget it”. Have a look at the other Nginx plugins for cPanel… ‘Nough said 😉
8. Engintron allows for both HTTP and HTTPS traffic to flow through Nginx entirely, as of version 1.8.0.
9. Engintron is 100% open source. You can easily examine its code here on GitHub, tear it apart, customize it, fork it, knife it or contribute back to its development. Do whatever you want with it 🙂
10. And finally, Engintron (which was originally launched in April 2014) is nowadays a mature project, one of the most popular cPanel plugins and the defacto Nginx installer for cPanel. It is by far the most reviewed plugin on the cPanel Applications Directory and the cPanel plugin/addon with the most stars on GitHub. According to simplified analytics from the Engintron WHM app (added in February 2016), it is actively used by dozens of thousands of sysadmins in 150+ countries around the world. According to BuiltWith, more than 300,000 sites worldwide are powered by Engintron-optimized cPanel servers. BuiltWith also reports around 1,5 million sites powered by cPanel. In other words, 1 in 5 cPanel servers worldwide has Engintron installed. The actual numbers may differ of course, but statistically speaking, it’s an interesting fact nevertheless…
    

FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions

More here: https://engintron.com/docs/#/pages/faq

 

Documentation

For more information regarding setup, configuration, or uninstallation, as well as other cPanel optimization tips, please visit the project’s Wiki pages at: https://engintron.com/docs

 

Feedback, Bugs, Feature Requests & Rating

• Please post your feedback and any issues or feature requests/suggestions in the project’s issue tracker at: https://github.com/engintron/engintron/issues
• If you use Engintron, please take a moment to post a rating and/or review here in the cPanel Applications Directory.

License

 

Engintron is released under the GNU/GPL license. For more info, have a look here: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.htm

How to install Engintron on cPanel

A few things to keep in mind before installing Engintron.

1. As of v1.8.0, Engintron has to perform constant file operations within cPanel to make sure HTTPS works smoothly. Since Engintron is built-in Bash & PHP, it’s mandatory that open_basedir protection is disabled in your system. Besides, if PHP is served via PHP-FPM or running as a CGI or FastCGI module in your server, the file system’s restrictions in access rights and file ownership will prevent you from having any issues with open_basedir disabled.
2. If you use a firewall like CSF (or similar), please make sure ports 8080 and 8443 are enabled. Apache will use these when Nginx binds to ports 80 and 443 to handle HTTP and HTTPS traffic respectively.
3. If you already had some other Nginx for cPanel plugin installed on your system, please make sure you’ve uninstalled it first.
   

Installation is a process that lasts only a few minutes. You’ll need root SSH access to your cPanel server so log in as root and type the following commands, one at a time:

# cd /

# rm -f engintron.sh

# wget –no-check-certificate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/engintron/engintron/master/engintron.sh # bash engintron.sh install

The process will take a couple of minutes to complete and after that, Engintron will be installed on your cPanel server.

Inside the Engintron app dashboard, you’ll also find some handy utilities to monitor things like your Nginx access & error logs, check processes on your server or see incoming traffic on ports 80 & 443 (HTTP & HTTPS traffic respectively). Engintron does not need any additional configuration and will work right away.

Engintron is a better solution compared to other Nginx plugins for cPanel.