How to Install nginx and google pagespeed on Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet)

Nginx (engine-x) is a open source and high performance HTTP server, reverse proxy and IMAP/POP3 proxy server. The outstanding features of Nginx are: stability, rich feature set, simple configuration and low resource consumption. Nginx is being used by some of the largest websites on the internet and is gaining more and more popularity in the webmaster community. This tutorials shows how to build a nginx .deb package for Ubuntu 15.04 from source that has Google pagespeed module compiled in.

Pagespeed is a web server module developed by Google to speed up a website response times, optimize html and reduce the page load time. ngx_pagespeed features include :

• Image optimization: stripping meta-data, dynamic resizing, recompression.
• CSS & JavaScript minification, concatenation, inlining, and outlining.
• Small resource inlining.
• Deferring image and JavaScript loading.
• HTML rewriting.
• Cache lifetime extension.

see more https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/.

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu Server 15.04 - 64 bit
• root privileges

What we will do in this tutorial :

1. Install the prerequisite packages.
2. Installing nginx with ngx_pagespeed.
3. Testing.

Install the prerequisite packages

sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev build-essential zlib1g-dev libpcre3 libpcre3-dev

Installing nginx with ngx_pagespeed

Step 1 - Adding nginx repository

vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nginx.list

add the line:

deb http://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu/ trusty nginx
deb-src http://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu/ trusty nginx

Update your repository:

sudo apt-get update

note : if you get the messege : GPG error [...] NO_PUBKEY [...] bla bla

please add the the key:

sudo sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys KEYNUMBER
sudo apt-get update

Step 2 - Download nginx 1.8 from ubuntu repository

sudo su
cd ~
mkdir -p ~/new/nginx_source/
cd ~/new/nginx_source/
apt-get source nginx
apt-get build-dep nginx

Step 3 - Download Pagespeed

cd ~
mkdir -p ~/new/ngx_pagespeed/
cd ~/new/ngx_pagespeed/
ngx_version=1.9.32.3
wget https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed/archive/release-${ngx_version}-beta.zip
unzip release-${ngx_version}-beta.zip

cd ngx_pagespeed-release-1.9.32.3-beta/
wget https://dl.google.com/dl/page-speed/psol/${ngx_version}.tar.gz
tar -xzf 1.9.32.3.tar.gz

Step 4 - Configure nginx to build with Pagespeed

cd ~/new/nginx_source/nginx-1.8.0/debin/
vim rules

add the module under CFLAGS `.configure` :

--add-module=../../ngx_pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed-release-1.9.32.3-beta \

Step 5 - Build nginx package and Install

cd ~/new/nginx_source/nginx-1.8.0/
dpkg-buildpackage -b

The dpkg-buildpackage command will build the nginx.deb under ~/new/ngix_source/ Once package building is complete, please look in the directory:

cd ~/new/ngix_source/
ls

And then install nginx.

dpkg -i nginx_1.8.0-1~trusty_amd64.deb

Testing

Run nginx -V to see the ngx_pagespeed was builted with nginx.

nginx -V

Conclusion

The nginx web server there is a stable and fast open source http server that supports a variety of modules for optimization. One of these modules is the 'PageSpeed module' which is developed by google. Unlike apache, nginx modules are not dynamically loadable, so you have to select the desired modules before you build the nginx package.