1.CentOS - Installing Nginx from source
http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/2/2/centos-installing-nginx-from-source
Versions
At the time of writing, the latest stable version of Nginx is 0.6.34. You can check the latest versions and change logs at the main nginx site.
Building from source will allow you to have the latest available versions of Nginx. However, keep in mind that security updates will not be applied automatically.
Please see this article if you want to install Nginx with the package manager which ensures that any dependencies as well as security updates are installed as needed.
Dependencies
As we are not using the package manager to install nginx, we need to take care of some dependencies.
Not many are needed and include pcre-devel zlib-devel and openssl-devel packages.
sudo yum install pcre-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel
Download
Now we can download the source code.
Create a 'sources' directory (you can download it anywhere you want to):
mkdir ~/sources
Now move into the folder:
cd ~/sources/
And then download the source code:
wget http://sysoev.ru/nginx/nginx-0.6.34.tar.gz
Unpack
Unpack the downloaded tar file and move into the newly created directory:
tar -zxvf nginx-0.6.34.tar.gz
...
cd nginx-0.6.34/
Options
There are quite a few compile time options that are available to use.
Have a look at the Install Options page of the Nginx wiki for full details.
We're going to use just two options to customize the install. The first of which is:
--sbin-path=/usr/local/sbin
By default, nginx will be installed in /usr/local/nginx which, although a good place, does mean the main Nginx binary will be found in /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx.
Not a location we are likely to find in our default search paths. So instead of adding new directories to our path (which may cause errors later on) we simply define where to put the binary.
The second option is:
--with-http_ssl_module
Probably self explanatory, but this will enable the SSL module to be compiled so we can parse https requests.
Compile
Let's go ahead and compile Nginx using those two options:
./configure --sbin-path=/usr/local/sbin --with-http_ssl_module
There will be a nice summary at the end of the compile which includes such items as:
...
nginx path prefix: "/usr/local/nginx"
nginx binary file: "/usr/local/sbin"
nginx configuration file: "/usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf"
...
Keep a note of the output as it does contain some useful paths and locations for various files.
Make
Ok, let's go ahead and 'make' and then 'make install':
make
...
sudo make install
Defaults
Done. We can test the install by starting Nginx:
sudo /usr/local/sbin/nginx
and navigating to our Slice IP address (assuming you have no other server running):
http://123.45.67.890
You will be greeted with the standard welcome page:
Stop
If you have used Apache or some other web server (or even installing Nginx via a package manager), you may be used to using a script to start and stop it such as you might find in '/etc/init.d/'.
Unfortunately, compiling from source does not create a script like that (we will create an init script in the next article or two).
You may have noticed that one of the paths noted in the compile summary was:
nginx pid file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid"
Let's make use of that to stop Nginx:
sudo kill `cat /usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid`
That will use the output of the pid file to kill the Nginx process - note the use of backticks (`) and not single quotes (') in the command.
Summary
Although quite detailed, we have installed the latest stable version of Nginx from source and compiled it with some custom options to make life slightly easier.
We also know how to start and stop Nginx by hand.
As mentioned, the next couple of articles will deal with learning how to create an init script so we have more control over Nginx.
Once done, we will then look at configuring Nginx, setting up vhosts and proxying to a backend (such as a cluster of mongrels).
2. How to Install and Configure Nginx from Source on Linux
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/07/install-nginx-from-source/
Before we understand what is nginx, we should know how to pronounce nginx.
Its not N G I N X. nginx is pronounced as “Engine X”.
nginx is short form after you remove both the e’s from “Engine X”.
nginx is an open source web server that is similar to Apache, but very light weight. nginx is both web server and reverse proxy server.
The following are some of the features of nginx:
- It serves static and index files
- Reverse proxy with caching
- Supports SSL
- Simple load balancing with fault tolerance
- Both name-based and ip-based virtual server can be configured
- HTTP basic authentication
- Supports rewrite module
- Supports gzip, XSLT, SSI and image resizing filters
- All the main mail proxy server features are supported
- and lot more..
This is part of an ongoing series of articles on nginx.
Let us get started by installing nginx and get it up and running, which takes only 5 minutes.
1. Download nginx
Download nginx from here, or use wget as shown below. The current stable version is nginx 1.0.5
cd
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.0.5.tar.gz
tar xvfz nginx-1.0.5.tar.gz
cd nginx-1.0.5
2. Install nginx
There are lot of options that you can pass to ./configure. To identify list of all the configuration options do the following.
./configure --help
The following are some of the http modules that are automatically enabled. If you need to disable them, yo should pass “–without-http_[module_name]” to the ./configure option. For example, to disable “proxy_module”, you should do ./configure –without-http_proxy_module.
- charset_module – HTTP Character set module
- gzip_module – HTTP gzip module for compression
- ssi_module – Server side include modules
- auth_basic_module – HTTP Basic authentication modules.
- autoindex_module – Auto index
- rewrite_module – HTTP rewrite that supports rewrite rules
- proxy_module – HTTP reverse proxy module
- fastcgi_module – Support for fastcgi
- memcached_module – Memcached module for nginx
- ..
Following are some of the httpd modules that are not automatically enabled. If you need to enable them, you should pass “–with-http_[module_name]” to the ./configure option. For example, to enable SSL in nginx, you should do “./configure –with-http_ssl_module”.
- ssl_module – Support for Secure Socket Layer (SSL) module
- xslt_module – Support for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) module
- perl_module – Support for Perl
- ..
To begin with, install nginx with the default configuration options by doing ./configure as shown below.
./configure
make
make install
During ./configure, you might get the “./configure: error: the HTTP rewrite module requires the PCRE library.” error message about missing PCRE library that is required by nginx http rewrite module.
To solve the problem, either install “pcre” and “pcre-devel” packages on your Linux, or disable the rewrite module by doing “./configure –without-http_rewrite_module”
nginx will be installed under /usr/local/nginx as shown by the ./configure output.
Configuration summary
+ using system PCRE library
+ OpenSSL library is not used
+ md5: using system crypto library
+ sha1: using system crypto library
+ using system zlib library nginx path prefix: "/usr/local/nginx"
nginx binary file: "/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx"
nginx configuration prefix: "/usr/local/nginx/conf"
nginx configuration file: "/usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf"
nginx pid file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid"
nginx error log file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/error.log"
nginx http access log file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log"
nginx http client request body temporary files: "client_body_temp"
nginx http proxy temporary files: "proxy_temp"
nginx http fastcgi temporary files: "fastcgi_temp"
nginx http uwsgi temporary files: "uwsgi_temp"
nginx http scgi temporary files: "scgi_temp"
3. Change the Default nginx Listen Port
Nginx is configured to listen by default on port 80. If you are installing this on a machine for testing purpose, that already has an apache server running, you should change the nginx listen port.
Similar to apache’s httpd.conf file, nginx has nginx.conf file located under /usr/local/nginx/conf.
In the server section of nginx.conf, change the port 80 to 8081.
# vi /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
server {
listen 8081;
server_name localhost;
4. Start Nginx Server
nginx executable is located under /usr/local/nginx/sbin directory. Just call this executable to start the nginx server.
cd /usr/local/nginx/sbin
./nginx
Once you start this, you’ll see the nginx “master process” and “worker process” if you do ps.
# ps -ef | grep -i nginx
root 18596 13:16 nginx: master process ./nginx
nobody 18597 13:16 nginx: worker process
After you start the nginx server, go to http://your-ip-address/ (or http://your-ip-address:8081, if you changed the listen directive in nginx.conf), you should see the default nginx index.html, which should say “Welcome to nginx!”
5. Stop Nginx Server
To stop the nginx server, do the following.
cd /usr/local/nginx/sbin
./nginx -s stop
To view the current version of nginx, do the following:
# ./nginx -v
nginx: nginx version: nginx/1.0.5
To debug issues, view the error.log and access.log files located under /usr/local/nginx/logs
# ls /usr/local/nginx/logs/
access.log
error.log
nginx.pid