LibreSpeed on FreeBSD

I needed a mobile speed test server for my network diagnostics laptop recently. I have been using LibreSpeed in the office for quite some time so along with iperf3 on the same laptop, it was the logical choice.

First I created a VNET jail and updated it ready for use. BastilleBSD is my choice for jail management:

bastille create -T -B speed 13.0-RELEASE 192.168.1.10/24 lan
bastille update speed

As I also run bhyve guests on the laptop, I want the jail to bind to existing bridges that are managed by vm-bhyve. Once updates are complete, console into the jail to install and configure LibreSpeed:

bastille console speed

For LibreSpeed, FreeBSD already has it in ports/pkgs so we just need that package and a web server. We will be using Nginx in this instance:

pkg install -y librespeed-php81 nginx

Enable nginx and php-fpm to be able to launch them with the service command:

service nginx enable && service php-fpm enable

Copy the example HTML file to the LibreSpeed directory that is suitable for your environment:

cd /usr/local/share/examples/librespeed
cp -a example-singleServer-full.html /usr/local/www/librespeed/index.html

The default /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf file needs some tweaking to make things work correctly. Below is a diff between the FreeBSD -dist file and what was used in this configuration:

--- nginx.conf-dist     2022-02-12 12:51:09.000000000 +1100
+++ nginx.conf  2022-02-17 14:08:34.731739000 +1100
@@ -39,16 +39,14 @@ http {

     server {
         listen       80;
-        server_name  localhost;
+        server_name  _;
+        root   /usr/local/www/librespeed;
+        index  index.html index.htm;

         #charset koi8-r;

         #access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

-        location / {
-            root   /usr/local/www/nginx;
-            index  index.html index.htm;
-        }

         #error_page  404              /404.html;

@@ -67,13 +65,12 @@ http {

         # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
         #
-        #location ~ \.php$ {
-        #    root           html;
-        #    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
-        #    fastcgi_index  index.php;
-        #    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /scripts$fastcgi_script_name;
-        #    include        fastcgi_params;
-        #}
+        location ~ \.php$ {
+            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
+            fastcgi_index  index.php;
+            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
+            include        fastcgi_params;
+        }

         # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
         # concurs with nginx's one

That is all that is needed. Simply start nginx and php-fpm, point your browser to the IP address of the instance and you can test any device that has network connectivity to your jail.