Install Nginx On CentOS 5.5 With SSL, PCRE, GeoIP, Zlib, Gzip And DAV Support

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can compile and install Nginx on CentOS 5.5 server with SSL, PCRE, GeoIP, Zlib, Gzip and DAV support.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

Pre-Installation

First we install httpd-devel, pcre, pcre-devel, zlib, zlib-devel, perl, geoip and geoip-devel packages like this:

yum install -y httpd-devel pcre perl pcre-devel zlib zlib-devel GeoIP GeoIP-devel

Download required packages

cd
wget ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre-8.10.tar.gz
wget http://zlib.net/zlib-1.2.5.tar.gz
wget ftp://ftp.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8o.tar.gz

Now you have to untar these files.

tar -xvf zlib-1.2.5.tar.gz
tar -xvf pcre-8.10.tar.gz
tar -xvf openssl-0.9.8o.tar.gz

Download Nginx source package

You need to download Nginx source package from http://nginx.org/.

cd
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-0.7.67.tar.gz
tar -xvf nginx-0.7.67.tar.gz
cd nginx-0.7.67

Compile and Install Nginx

Now you can compile and install Nginx with the following commands:

./configure --user=nginx --group=nginx --prefix=/usr/share/nginx --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log --http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log --http-client-body-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/tmp/client_body --http-proxy-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/tmp/proxy --http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/tmp/fastcgi --pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid --lock-path=/var/lock/subsys/nginx --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_realip_module --with-http_addition_module --with-http_sub_module --with-http_dav_module --with-http_flv_module --with-http_gzip_static_module --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_perl_module --with-mail --with-mail_ssl_module --with-cc-opt='-m32 -march=i386' --with-openssl=/root/openssl-0.9.8o --with-pcre --with-pcre=/root/pcre-8.10 --with-zlib=/root/zlib-1.2.5 --with-http_geoip_module

You can find out more options by using the following command:

./configure --help

Now run:

make
make install

Configuration Summary

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

Start Nginx Server

/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -c /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

Testing

/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -V