I recently installed and set up a Cacti graphing server on my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS headless server with nginx as my chosen web server. I’ve decided to share the basic configuration steps that I took.

Cacti with nginx

  1. Install all pre-requisite packages for Cacti

    • apt-get install nginx snmpd php5-fpm
    • Note that if you do not plan on using Apache as your web server (as in my case), you must install the php5-fpm package before installing packages php5 and cacti, otherwise apt will choose to install the libapache2-mod-php5 Apache 2 module as a dependency for them. This package is unnecessary if you don’t have Apache installed.

  2. Edit your nginx config file (usually found under /etc/nginx/ directory) and enable handling of php scripts via nginx’s fastcgi directives. Don’t forget to add “index.php” to the index directive within the php location block context.

  3. Edit php-fpm’s www.conf file

    • Make php use a unix socket instead of a tcp socket by setting the listen directive to /var/run/php5-fpm.sock
    • Set listen.owner and listen.group directives to the same user and group that your web server is running as
    • Set listen.mode directive to 0660

  4. Install php5, cacti and the spine poller

    • apt-get install php5 php5-cgi cacti cacti-spine

  5. Edit your nginx config file once again to add in a cacti location block

    location /cacti {
    alias /usr/share/cacti/site/;
    index index.php;
    gzip off;
   
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
    }
}
# Disallow access to the cacti scripts directory
# to prevent requests to download script files
location /cacti/scripts {
    deny all;
    return 404;
}

  6. Alternatively, instead of using the nginx alias directive you can make a symlink to the cacti static files (though I prefer using the alias directive described above)

    • Change directory to your nginx server root directory (/usr/share/nginx/www by default)
    • ln -s /usr/share/cacti/site cacti

  7. Restart nginx and php5-fpm services to allow their configuration changes to take affect

  8. Load up the cacti web page which should now be running on your local web server at http://localhost/cacti and complete the one-time setup. Default cacti login is admin/admin.

    • Change the poller type under the settings page to “spine”
    • Change the poller interval to every minute
    • Under “System Utilities”, click on “Rebuilt Poller Cache”

References

Installing the Cacti Server Monitor on Ubuntu 12.04 Cloud Server

How to install Cacti with Nginx

Resetting Cacti entirely

  1. Stop the poller (Cacti settings > Poller tab)

  2. Delete all rrd files

    rm -rf /var/lib/cacti/rra/*.rrd

  3. Drop/rename cacti database from MySQL

    mysql -u root -pPASSWORD -S /run/mysqld/mysqld.sock -h localhost -N -e "DROP DATABASE cacti;"

  4. Reconfigure cacti by following the prompts

    dpkg-reconfigure cacti