I was writing a post on a chicken dish I cooked yesterday. As I was trying to upload some pictures, I saw that the upload failed because the files were over 2MB. This was the first time I was posting pictures on my wordpress since I move to Digital Ocean as my hosting company. I knew this was a limit on the php configuration on the server, so it was an easy fix.

I logged in to my server and edited my php.ini located at /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini. All I had to do was to change -

upload_max_filesize = 2M

to

upload_max_filesize = 8M

Now restart the following services -

sudo service php5-fpm reload  
sudo service nginx reload

I went back to trying to upload the image. This time, the upload started to happen but I eventually saw another failure. Turns out, this time it was from Nginx. I found that nginx throws a 413 error if a file upload exceeds its default limit.

All you have to do to fix that is to over-ride the default in your sites config file. In my case I add the following in my default configuration at /etc/nginx/sites-available/default in the server block right under server_name -

client_max_body_size 8M;

Restart the services again-

sudo service php5-fpm reload  
sudo service nginx reload

The picture uploads worked this time :)

It’s been great with Digital Ocean so far.. and am really loving them!! Highly recommend using them. These guys have great documentation and their IRC channel on freenode are really helpful too!