Compiling and Installing NGINX from Source

Web Services / January 15, 2020 / By:

Contents

  1. Step 1: Installing NGINX dependencies
  2. Step 2: Download Binary
  3. Step 3: Configure Options
  4. Step 4: Make and  Make Install
  5. Step 5: Configure NGINX and  run

NGINX  is an open-source web server software designed to use as a web server, reverse proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancer. NGINX was created by Igor Sysoev to solve the C10k Problem. Below are the latest statistics of the market place of Apache and NGINX web servers on the internet by netcraft.com.

 

This solution allows the webserver to handle 10.000 concurrent connections with maximum efficiency. Rather than creating new processes as apache does, NGINX uses event-driven architecture. At the top, the master process spawns worker processes, each worker process can handle thousands of HTTP request simultaneously. NGINX is really good at serving static content when comparing with Apache. Reverse proxy and load balancer servers are common usages of NGINX. 

There are several types  of installation;

  • Docker image
  • Nginx repository
  • Operating Systems repositories
  • Already compiled  package(.rpm .dep  .exe) 
  • Compiling  Binary

At this post, I will explain how to compile and install NGINX web server from source code. It is recommended to install NGINX web server from source code because of some benefits;

  • Customize NGINX installation
  • Remove unnecessary modules and methods
  • Run NGINX with the specific application user
  • Reliability

Step 1: Installing NGINX dependencies

  • PCRE – supports regular expressions. Required by the NGINX Core and Rewrite modules.
  • zlib – Supports header compression. Required by the NGINX Gzip module.
  • OpenSSL – Supports the HTTPS protocol. Required by the NGINX SSL module and others.
  • GCC - Compile binaries

For well-known Linux distribution, you only need to install  "openssl-dev"  package to the server that you will use for compiling NGINX web server. Openssl-dev package contains all dependencies added above. Also, you have another option to compile the dependencies package from the tar file. Check NGINX documentation for more details. 

CentOS, RHEL, and  Fedora

#yum install openssl-devel gcc
#rpm -qa|egrep 'openssl-devel|pcre|zlib'
pcre-devel-8.32-17.el7.x86_64
zlib-devel-1.2.7-18.el7.x86_64
zlib-1.2.7-18.el7.x86_64
openssl-devel-1.0.2k-19.el7.x86_64
pcre-8.32-17.el7.x86_64

Debian Base Operating  Systems

#apt-get install libssl liblz-dev libpcre3
or
#apt get  install openssl-devel

Step 2: Download Binary

You need to download the stable source code from NGINX web site.

 

 

#mkdir  -p /web/nginx
#mkdir /web/nginx/modules
#mkdir  /web/nginx/run
#cd /web/nginx/
#wget https://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.17.6.tar.gz
#tar  -xzvf  nginx-1.17.6.tar.gz
#ls -lrt
total 1016
drwxr-xr-x 8 1001 1001     147 Nov 19 17:19 nginx-1.17.6
-rw-r--r-- 1 appuser appgroup 1037527 Nov 19 17:25 nginx-1.17.6.tar.gz
# rm  -rf  nginx-1.17.6.tar.gz 
#mkdir binaries 
#mv nginx-1.17.6/* binaries/
#rm  -rf nginx-1.17.6/
# pwd
/web/nginx/binaries
# ls  -lrt
total 764
-rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1001     49 Nov 19 17:18 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1001   1397 Nov 19 17:18 LICENSE
-rwxr-xr-x 1 1001 1001   2502 Nov 19 17:18 configure
-rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1001 458631 Nov 19 17:19 CHANGES.ru
-rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1001 300566 Nov 19 17:19 CHANGES
drwxr-xr-x 2 1001 1001     20 Jan 16 15:30 man
drwxr-xr-x 2 1001 1001     38 Jan 16 15:30 html
drwxr-xr-x 9 1001 1001     84 Jan 16 15:30 src
drwxr-xr-x 4 1001 1001     68 Jan 16 15:30 contrib
drwxr-xr-x 2 1001 1001   4096 Jan 16 15:30 conf
drwxr-xr-x 6 1001 1001   4096 Jan 16 15:30 auto

Step 3: Configure Options

Configure options can be specified with the script "./configure"  under binaries directory. You can check all options with "./configure --help"  command.

#./configure --help

  --help                             print this message
  --prefix=PATH                      set installation prefix
  --sbin-path=PATH                   set nginx binary pathname
  --modules-path=PATH                set modules path
  --conf-path=PATH                   set nginx.conf pathname
  --error-log-path=PATH              set error log pathname
  --pid-path=PATH                    set nginx.pid pathname
  --lock-path=PATH                   set nginx.lock pathname
Options Describtion
--prefix set installation prefix
--modules-path set modules path
--with-http_ssl_module enable ngx_http_ssl_module
--without-http_fastcgi_module disable ngx_http_fastcgi_module
--without-http_uwsgi_module disable ngx_http_uwsgi_module
--without-http_grpc_module disable ngx_http_grpc_module
--without-http_scgi_module disable ngx_http_scgi_module
--without-mail_imap_module disable ngx_mail_imap_module
--without-mail_pop3_module  disable ngx_mail_pop3_module 
# ./configure --prefix=/web/nginx --modules-path=/web/nginx/modules --with-http_ssl_module  --without-http_fastcgi_module --without-http_uwsgi_module --without-http_grpc_module --without-http_scgi_module --without-mail_imap_module --without-mail_pop3_module 
checking for OS
 + Linux 3.10.0-327.28.3.el7.x86_64 x86_64
checking for C compiler ... found
 + using GNU C compiler
 + gcc version: 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-39) (GCC) 
checking for gcc -pipe switch ... found
checking for -Wl,-E switch ... found
checking for gcc builtin atomic operations ... found
checking for C99 variadic macros ... found
checking for gcc variadic macros ... found
checking for gcc builtin 64 bit byteswap ... found
checking for unistd.h ... found
checking for inttypes.h ... found
checking for limits.h ... found
checking for sys/filio.h ... not found
checking for sys/param.h ... found
checking for sys/mount.h ... found
checking for sys/statvfs.h ... found
checking for crypt.h ... found
checking for Linux specific features
checking for epoll ... found
checking for EPOLLRDHUP ... found
checking for EPOLLEXCLUSIVE ... not found
checking for O_PATH ... found
checking for sendfile() ... found
checking for sendfile64() ... found
checking for sys/prctl.h ... found
checking for prctl(PR_SET_DUMPABLE) ... found
checking for prctl(PR_SET_KEEPCAPS) ... found
checking for capabilities ... found
checking for crypt_r() ... found
checking for sys/vfs.h ... found
checking for nobody group ... found
checking for poll() ... found
checking for /dev/poll ... not found
checking for kqueue ... not found
checking for crypt() ... not found
checking for crypt() in libcrypt ... found
checking for F_READAHEAD ... not found
checking for posix_fadvise() ... found
checking for O_DIRECT ... found
checking for F_NOCACHE ... not found
checking for directio() ... not found
checking for statfs() ... found
checking for statvfs() ... found
checking for dlopen() ... not found
checking for dlopen() in libdl ... found
checking for sched_yield() ... found
checking for sched_setaffinity() ... found
checking for SO_SETFIB ... not found
checking for SO_REUSEPORT ... found
checking for SO_ACCEPTFILTER ... not found
checking for SO_BINDANY ... not found
checking for IP_TRANSPARENT ... found
checking for IP_BINDANY ... not found
checking for IP_BIND_ADDRESS_NO_PORT ... not found
checking for IP_RECVDSTADDR ... not found
checking for IP_SENDSRCADDR ... not found
checking for IP_PKTINFO ... found
checking for IPV6_RECVPKTINFO ... found
checking for TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT ... found
checking for TCP_KEEPIDLE ... found
checking for TCP_FASTOPEN ... found
checking for TCP_INFO ... found
checking for accept4() ... found
checking for eventfd() ... found
checking for int size ... 4 bytes
checking for long size ... 8 bytes
checking for long long size ... 8 bytes
checking for void * size ... 8 bytes
checking for uint32_t ... found
checking for uint64_t ... found
checking for sig_atomic_t ... found
checking for sig_atomic_t size ... 4 bytes
checking for socklen_t ... found
checking for in_addr_t ... found
checking for in_port_t ... found
checking for rlim_t ... found
checking for uintptr_t ... uintptr_t found
checking for system byte ordering ... little endian
checking for size_t size ... 8 bytes
checking for off_t size ... 8 bytes
checking for time_t size ... 8 bytes
checking for AF_INET6 ... found
checking for setproctitle() ... not found
checking for pread() ... found
checking for pwrite() ... found
checking for pwritev() ... found
checking for sys_nerr ... found
checking for localtime_r() ... found
checking for clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) ... found
checking for posix_memalign() ... found
checking for memalign() ... found
checking for mmap(MAP_ANON|MAP_SHARED) ... found
checking for mmap("/dev/zero", MAP_SHARED) ... found
checking for System V shared memory ... found
checking for POSIX semaphores ... not found
checking for POSIX semaphores in libpthread ... found
checking for struct msghdr.msg_control ... found
checking for ioctl(FIONBIO) ... found
checking for ioctl(FIONREAD) ... found
checking for struct tm.tm_gmtoff ... found
checking for struct dirent.d_namlen ... not found
checking for struct dirent.d_type ... found
checking for sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN) ... found
checking for sysconf(_SC_LEVEL1_DCACHE_LINESIZE) ... found
checking for openat(), fstatat() ... found
checking for getaddrinfo() ... found
checking for PCRE library ... found
checking for PCRE JIT support ... found
checking for OpenSSL library ... found
checking for zlib library ... found
creating objs/Makefile

Configuration summary
  + using system PCRE library
  + using system OpenSSL library
  + using system zlib library

  nginx path prefix: "/web/nginx"
  nginx binary file: "/web/nginx/sbin/nginx"
  nginx modules path: "/web/nginx/modules"
  nginx configuration prefix: "/web/nginx/conf"
  nginx configuration file: "/web/nginx/conf/nginx.conf"
  nginx pid file: "/web/nginx/logs/nginx.pid"
  nginx error log file: "/web/nginx/logs/error.log"
  nginx http access log file: "/web/logs"
  nginx http client request body temporary files: "client_body_temp"
  nginx http proxy temporary files: "proxy_temp"

 

Step 4: Make and  Make Install

 

# make
make -f objs/Makefile
make[1]: Entering directory `/web/nginx/binaries'
cc -c -pipe  -O -W -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wno-unused-parameter -Werror -g  -I src/core -I src/event -I src/event/modules -I src/os/unix -I objs \
        -o objs/src/core/nginx.o \
        src/core/nginx.c
cc -c -pipe  -O -W -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wno-unused-parameter -Werror -g  -I src/core -I src/event -I src/event/modules -I src/os/unix -I objs \
        -o objs/src/core/ngx_log.o \
        src/core/ngx_log.c

 

# make  install
make -f objs/Makefile install
make[1]: Entering directory `/web/nginx/binaries'
test -d '/web/nginx' || mkdir -p '/web/nginx'
test -d '/web/nginx/sbin' \
        || mkdir -p '/web/nginx/sbin'
test ! -f '/web/nginx/sbin/nginx' \
        || mv '/web/nginx/sbin/nginx' \
                '/web/nginx/sbin/nginx.old'
cp objs/nginx '/web/nginx/sbin/nginx'
test -d '/web/nginx/conf' \
        || mkdir -p '/web/nginx/conf'
cp conf/koi-win '/web/nginx/conf'
cp conf/koi-utf '/web/nginx/conf'
cp conf/win-utf '/web/nginx/conf'
test -f '/web/nginx/conf/mime.types' \
        || cp conf/mime.types '/web/nginx/conf'
cp conf/mime.types '/web/nginx/conf/mime.types.default'
test -f '/web/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params' \
        || cp conf/fastcgi_params '/web/nginx/conf'
cp conf/fastcgi_params \
        '/web/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params.default'
test -f '/web/nginx/conf/fastcgi.conf' \
        || cp conf/fastcgi.conf '/web/nginx/conf'
cp conf/fastcgi.conf '/web/nginx/conf/fastcgi.conf.default'
test -f '/web/nginx/conf/uwsgi_params' \
        || cp conf/uwsgi_params '/web/nginx/conf'
cp conf/uwsgi_params \
        '/web/nginx/conf/uwsgi_params.default'
test -f '/web/nginx/conf/scgi_params' \
        || cp conf/scgi_params '/web/nginx/conf'
cp conf/scgi_params \
        '/web/nginx/conf/scgi_params.default'
test -f '/web/nginx/conf/nginx.conf' \
        || cp conf/nginx.conf '/web/nginx/conf/nginx.conf'
cp conf/nginx.conf '/web/nginx/conf/nginx.conf.default'
test -d '/web/nginx/logs' \
        || mkdir -p '/web/nginx/logs'
test -d '/web' \
        || mkdir -p '/web'
test -d '/web/nginx/html' \
        || cp -R html '/web/nginx'
test -d '/web/nginx/logs' \
        || mkdir -p '/web/nginx/logs'
make[1]: Leaving directory `/web/nginx/binaries'


Step 5: Configure NGINX and  run

# pwd
/web/nginx
#rm  -rf binaries/
#vi /web/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
# - define application user
user  appuser;
# - define worker  process
worker_processes  5;
# - define pid file that systemd checks for if  application is running.
pid        run/nginx.pid;
#/web/nginx/sbin/nginx  -c  /web/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

Step 5: Configure NGINX service for RHEL-CentOS 

# cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service 
[Unit]
Description=nginx - high performance web server
Documentation=http://nginx.org/en/docs/
After=network-online.target remote-fs.target nss-lookup.target
Wants=network-online.target


[Service]

User=appuser
Group=appgroup

Type=forking
PIDFile=/web/nginx/run/nginx.pid
ExecStart=/web/nginx/sbin/nginx -c /web/web/conf/nginx.conf
ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID
ExecStop=/bin/kill -s TERM $MAINPID

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

 

#systemctl enable nginx.service
#systemctl start  nginx

 

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