For a long time Apache has been the software choice for admins and developers wishing to setup a web server. It is therefore no surprise, that Apache dominates when it comes to the most deployed web server on the Internet today. Take a look at Netcraft’s survey as of January 2015.

I have used Apache since the early days of the Internet, but lately, I’ve noticed its become very bloated. In fact for any embedded developers out there, Apache is these days frown upon, when it comes to arm based devices such as the Raspberry Pi. Here is where Nginx comes in. It is very light weight and fast, and can easily be installed in your embedded and other web server projects. Try it, and you may find yourself liking it so much, that you’ll switch from running Apache in your enterprise or hosting environment.

Nginx is an open source high performance HTTP and reverse proxy server. It is very scalable and very suitable for production environments that need to serve many requests. Compared to Apache, Nginx handles requests using an asynchronous event-driven approach. Apache uses a process/thread oriented approach which makes it unpredictable when it comes to very high loads.

While installation via packages managers such as yum or apt is possible, I chose to install Nginx on a Raspberry Pi using sources. Going the source-install route has some benefits, one of which is that you get the latest version of Nginx, which usually takes sometime to make its way to distribution package repositories. Lets get started with the install.

Download sources:

cd /tmp

wget -c http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.7.10.tar.gz


tar zxvf /tmp/nginx-1.7.10.tar.gz -C /usr/src

cd /usr/src/nginx-1.7.10

./configure --prefix=/usr/share/nginx --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --with-perl_modules_path=/usr/lib/perl5/auto/nginx --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log --http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log --pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid --lock-path=/var/run/lock/subsys/nginx --user=nginx --group=nginx --with-http_addition_module --with-http_auth_request_module --with-http_degradation_module --with-http_perl_module --with-http_flv_module --with-http_geoip_module --with-google_perftools_module --with-http_gzip_static_module --with-http_gunzip_module --with-http_image_filter_module --with-http_mp4_module --with-http_random_index_module --with-http_realip_module --with-http_secure_link_module --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_sub_module --with-http_dav_module --with-http_xslt_module --with-file-aio --with-ipv6 --with-mail --with-mail_ssl_module --with-ld-opt="-Wl,-E"

Notice that I added several optional modules, which means any dependencies need to be resolved before you proceed. You can read about built-in and optional modules at: http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules. On Fedora 20 I ran into errors starting nginx, so I added the configure option –with-ld-opt=”-Wl,-E” to resolve it

make && make install

Create the server user and group:

On Red Hat based systems like Fedora, run the following command to add a user and group for the webserver:

useradd -M -r -c "Nginx Web Server" -s /sbin/nologin -d /var/spool/nginx nginx

Setup directory permissions:

Give nginx user the permission to use directories

chown -R nginx:nginx /usr/share/nginx
chown -R nginx:nginx /var/log/nginx

Add the start up script

In order to automatically start nginx at boot time, you will need to setup an init script. Luckily, the folks over at Nginx have put together several star/stop scripts depending on your Linux distribution. You can collect them at: http://wiki.nginx.org/InitScripts

Since Am using Fedora and hence systemd, the following is the start up script:

[Unit]
Description=The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server
After=syslog.target network.target remote-fs.target nss-lookup.target

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save this file at: /usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service.

Enable it to start automatically at boot.

systemctl enable nginx.service.

Testing:

Start Nginx:

systemctl start nginx.service

check to see if Nginx is listening on port 80

lsof -i :80 (You need the package lsof, if not use netstat)

Open your browser and go to:
http://localhost/

You will be greeted by a welcome HTML page.

That’s it for now. Next time, I will take a look at how to configure Nginx, and even enable PHP, so you can install most Content Management Systems (CMS) like wordpress on your web server easily.