A small program (there is a C and an equivalent Perl implementation) to launch PHP FastCGI instances with systemd socket activation.
The systemd unit files use a template mechanism to drop privileges to the user specified in the template (see the enable.pl helper script).
This is really handy for running PHP in FastCGI mode with lighttpd, nginx, or even apache, communicating over a Unix domain socket.
It decouples the web server from PHP (and allows them to run as different users) for better security.
As a bonus, if PHP crashes (or you need to restart the PHP daemons for maintenance/configuration changes), systemd will buffer any incoming requests on the socket it manages.
It will then automatically restart the service (with the socket being passed to the PHP daemon --- that's all this program really does, everything else is handled by systemd).
This will, by default, compile the C implementation and install the binary to /usr/local/bin/spawn-php-fcgi.
make
sudo make installTo enable PHP FastCGI to run as users john, jack, and jill, run the following helper script.
sudo ./enable.pl john jack jillThe systemd controlled sockets will be created in: /run/spawn-php-fcgi/.
Systemd socket activation: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/socket-activation.html
Includes documentation on systemd templates (amongst other things):
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.unit.html