The title of this post is a bit stupid, but I honestly couldn’t think of any other way to write it…
When compiling nginx by hand, by default make install will push the binaries out to /usr/local/nginx and it doesn’t come with a start/stop script, understandably because it doesn’t know which OS it is going to be installed on etc etc.
Recently I was tasked with building nginx to an old Red Hat Enterprise Live 4 server with no yum installation, no nginx package in up2date and not being able to find an RPM that’s link wasn’t dead.
I’ve always felt that, being a Debian user, people think of me as only being able to use apt-get and if I’m feeling especially adventurous dpkg - to install applications. Some people know that I build .deb files in my spare time, but most don’t and for some weird reason I still feel they think that about me. Paranoia?
Anyway, I decided to do it the old fashioned way and build nginx from source on the RHEL4 box, simple tasks if you know how to do it correctly.
Brief introduction of what’s to come
In this article I will explain the build process, options I pass to configure and also provide a start/stop script for RHEL4, 5 and Debian.
The build process can be found on the nginx wiki and is a very simple thing, but I passed some different arguments to do the follow;
- Install all modules that I wanted
- Build to /usr/bin, store config files in /etc/nginx, add sites-available, sites-enabled folders and logs to /var/log/nginx
I’m going to assume you have the latest 0.7.X or even 0.8.X source already downloaded, untarred and also have gcc and all other required build modules installed.
You’ll need to be in your source directory to execute the following commands.
Installation
First we will add a www-data user and group to run as. You may already have this set up for you if you’ve already installed Apache or nginx from yum or apt in the past.
To check to see if you already have a www-data user run the following command as root.
grep www-data /etc/passwd
You should see the following output, the at signs (@) represent a number.
www-data:x:@@:@@:www-data:/var/www:/bin/sh
If you don’t see this user then we will need to create it.
sudo useradd -d /var/www -m -U www-data
The -d argument sets the user’s home directory to /var/www, -m creates the home directory if it does not exist and -U will create a group with the same name as the user.
I install nginx with both SSL and rewrite enabled, both of these modules require some extra modules install on your system.
SSL
Debian
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
RedHat (yum)
sudo yum install libssl-dev
If you don’t have yum installed you will either need to find an RPM or install openssl from source (https://www.openssl.org/source/)
Rewrite module
Debian
sudo apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev
Configuring
Next we will configure the source
./configure --sbin-path=/usr/bin/nginx \
--conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf \
--pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid \
--lock-path=/var/lock/nginx.lock \
--error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log \
--http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log \
--user=www-data \
--group=www-data \
--http-client-body-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/body \
--http-proxy-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/proxy \
--http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/fastcgi \
--with-http_ssl_module \
--with-http_realip_module \
--with-http_addition_module \
--with-debug \
--with-http_flv_module \
--with-http_stub_status_module \
The above command will configure nginx, setting the path to it’s binary to /usr/bin/nginx, config file path to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, pid to /var/run/nginx.pid, lock file to /var/lock/nginx.lock, error and access logs to /var/log/nginx, tell nginx to run as www-data with group www-data, set it’s temp paths to /var/lib/nginx and enable the following modules; ssl, realip, addition (used for adding content to the start and end of pages), debug, flash video and status modules.
If you didn’t want to install openssl or pcre then you will have to compile without ssl and pcre. Remove —with-http_ssl_module from above and disable the rewrite module.
--without-http_rewrite_module
Compiling
Once done, if you have no errors you can actually compile nginx.
make
sudo make install
nginx configuration
Next we need to configure nginx to give it some nice configuration options. First open up nginx’s main configuration file
/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Modify it to look like the one below.
user www-data www-data;
worker_processes 2;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
keepalive_timeout 5;
tcp_nodelay on;
gzip on;
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}
Next we’ll create the sub directories for holding site and module configuation.
sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/sites-available
sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/conf.d
Next we’ll create the default server definition.
/etc/nginx/sites-available/default
And put the following in it.
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log;
location / {
root /var/www/;
index index.html index.htm;
}
location /nginx_status {
stub_status on;
access_log off;
allow 127.0.0.1;
deny all;
}
}
Now we symlink it in to the sites-enabled directory.
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
Start/stop scripts
Once installation is complete we need to install a start/stop script, to simply make life easier.
You can get the Debian version from here or the RedHat version from here.
Starting nginx
/etc/init.d/nginx start
Starting the service on boot
Edit the following file:
/etc/rc.local
And add the following before the exit call.
/etc/init.d/nginx start
