Nginx is a very popular web server just like apache. But it’s popular for it’s scalability. When it comes to handling requests, Nginx is a beast. It is simple, fast and friendly. Today we shall see how easily we can install Nginx on our Linux server.

Requirements

Nginx has the following requirements:

# Gzip module requires zlib library
# Rewrite module requires pcre library
# SSL support requires openssl library

Download NGinx from http://nginx.org/en/download.html
Extract the source and then run the following commands:

cd <directory>
./configure
make
sudo make install

To install on Ubuntu, use this command to get the PCRE packages:

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev

Running NGinx

Start the server by running /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx as root. After editing the configuration file at /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf to your liking, you can reload the configuration with:

 kill -HUP `cat /usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid`

The location of nginx.pid might be different on your machine. For Ubuntu, it is located at:

 /var/run/nginx.pid

Starting and Stopping

To start:

sudo /usr/bin/nginx

To Stop:

sudo /usr/bin/nginx -s stop

Or alternatively:

sudo kill -QUIT $( cat /usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid )