Nginx configuration and install

 

Nginx Install

In Debian it is advisable to use dotdeb repositories because it contains updated pre-compiled versions of Nginx. To do this place in /etc/apt/sources.list the repository packages.dotdeb.org, download and install their public key:

echo "deb http://packages.dotdeb.org squeeze all" >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg
apt-key add dotdeb.gpg
apt-get update 

Then install Nginx with apt-get:

apt-get install nginx

On FreeBSD you can use pkg_add -vvv nginx (if you have FreeBSD 10 onward use pkg install nginx). You can also install it with make install clean from /usr/ports/www/nginx (only if you have ports installed an configured correctly). Nginx comes installed by default on OpenBSD starting from 5.2.

 

Configuration

Once installed we can find Nginx's configuration files on /etc/nginx. Those that uses apache will notice that Debian uses sites-available and sites-enabled folders (on /etc/nginx/). For those who doesn't have a clue about the folders in the first one you can find the configuration files of the "available" Web sites and on the second folder a symbolic link to the sites that are on sites-available. As you can infer if there is not a symbolic link from a web page on sites-available to sites-enabled Nginx will NOT server the site. Now i will show you an edited /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file and try to explain its options:

user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 768;
}

http {
  sendfile on;
  tcp_nopush on;
  tcp_nodelay on;
  types_hash_max_size 2048;
  server_tokens off;
  include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
  default_type application/octet-stream;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
  gzip on;
  gzip_disable "msie6";
  gzip_vary on;
  gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript application/xml
  application/json image/png image/gif image/jpeg image/jpg;
  gzip_comp_level 6;
  gzip_buffers 16 8k;
  client_body_in_single_buffer on;
  client_body_buffer_size  1K;
  client_header_buffer_size 1k;
  client_max_body_size 1k;
  large_client_header_buffers 2 1k;
  client_body_timeout   10;
  client_header_timeout 10;
  keepalive_timeout     30;
  send_timeout          10;
  include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
  include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}