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 webserver to act as a reverse caching proxy for static files (like CSS, JS, images etc.) with an additional micro-cache layer to significantly improve 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.
Engintron is Nginx on cPanel, done right!
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 amazing performance for your sites, without having to sacrifice important hosting features found in cPanel.
And best of all? Engintron is totally free to use!
But 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.
The way Engintron sets up Nginx inside your cPanel is a lot like how the popular CloudFlare CDN works. Nginx (like CloudFlare) directly serves all static content like CSS, JS, images etc. instead of your actual web server, thus lowering the load on your cPanel server. But unlike CloudFlare which requires that all your domains are set up with that service, you do everything inside your cPanel server. And better still? You also have an additional caching layer for when your traffic spikes, not just on one website, but entirely for your server. This additional caching layer is referred to as a "micro cache" and it only caches GET & HEAD requests (never POST requests) which means that it is possible to use it on any type of website, either a small dynamic Joomla corporate website or WordPress blog to a more complex news portal or forum or e-commerce website, that requires users to log in and handle personalized content or even generate content. Engintron's 1 second "micro cache" solution setup with Nginx is therefore ideal for any type of website and it can raise the number of concurrent requests served by your cPanel server from a few hundred per second (using just Apache) to thousands (using Nginx in front of Apache).
Not only will your serving capacity increase, but the load on your server will also significantly drop :)
If you are facing performance issues with your cPanel server, Engintron is your go-to solution. And in fact it's really a "set & forget" solution as you'll set it up once and then it will just run on your server without any additional maintenance on your side.
If you can sign up for a cPanel/WHM server on any hosting company and work your way through WHM, then setting up Engintron should be a piece of cake for you. If you don't manage your cPanel server, then you can always (kindly) ask your hosting company or system administrator to have a look at Engintron and deploy it on your cPanel server. It really only takes a few minutes and there is zero configuration afterwards to get the standard optimizations offered by Nginx.
OK, I'm sold! How do I install Engintron on my cPanel server?
Installation is a process that lasts only a few minutes. You'll need root SSH access to your cPanel server. Also check the current requirements (listed lower). If everything is ok, 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
Or in one quick command to paste in the terminal:
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. Engintron has a nice user interface which is activated inside WHM, under the Plugins section. After installation, refresh WHM in your browser and you should see Engintron in the Plugins section (it's the absolute last section in WHM's sidebar).
In there, you'll find basic options to control Nginx, Apache and MySQL, all in one convenient place. Additionally, you can edit all of Nginx's configuration files (as well as some from Apache & MySQL) to get even more from Engintron (e.g. configure Engintron for use with CloudFlare). If however all you want is to accelerate both static & dynamic content delivery, then Engintron is already setup for you and you don't need to do anything more.
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).
For more information regarding setup, configuration or uninstallation, as well as other cPanel optimization tips, please visit the project's Wiki pages at: https://github.com/engintron/engintron/wiki
Why is Engintron a better solution compared to other Nginx installers for cPanel
There are 9 key differences when comparing Engintron with other Nginx installers for cPanel.
First and foremost, caching actually works with Engintron. 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 "black box" configuration that does all the magic. And it requires literally almost zero maintenance.
Second, 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).
Third, 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/upgrade" or upgrade the server 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, you simply install it on top of the previous installation. You don't need to uninstall it first like other Nginx installer plugins for cPanel do! Oh, and it works from CentOS 5 up to CentOS 7.
Fourth, you can safely uninstall Engintron and it will revert your entire system to how it was before you installed Engintron. Simple as that. Which 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.
Fifth, 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 3 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.
Sixth, 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. If additionally you use CloudFlare's SSL, by choosing "Flexible SSL" in CloudFlare's "Crypt" settings you can direct CloudFlare HTTPS traffic to your cPanel's HTTP port served by Nginx, thus further improving web serving over HTTPS as well. A true win-win situation.
Seventh, it doesn't require 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 installers... 'Nough said ;)
Eighth, Engintron allows for both HTTP and HTTPS traffic to flow through Nginx entirely, as of version 1.8.0.
And finally, Engintron is 100% open source.
