The quickest, and easiest, way to install Nginx is to simply use your OS-provided version. Most of the time, these are kept fairly updated; however, for some Linux distributions focusing on stability, you may only have older versions of Nginx available. Sometimes, your Linux distribution may provide multiple versions of Nginx with different compile flags.

In general, before embarking on a more complex journey, we should check if we can use the easy solution. For a Debian-based operating system, we first find the Nginx compiles available then get the info for the one we want:

apt-cache search nginx
apt-cache show PACKAGE_NAME
apt-get install PACKAGE_NAME

For Red Hat Linux-based operating systems, we need to enable the EPEL repo first and then do the same:

yum install epel-release
yum search nginx
yum info PACKAGE_NAME
yum install PACKAGE_NAME

If the version provided is current enough, then you're ready to configure Nginx in the next chapter.

If the version provided by your distribution is too old, then Nginx provides packages for RHEL/CentOS distributions as well as Debian/Ubuntu distributions.

To set up a yum repository for RHEL/CentOS, create a file named /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo with the following contents:

[nginx]
name=nginx repo
baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/OS/OSRELEASE/$basearch/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

Replace OS with rhel or centos, depending on the distribution used, and OSRELEASE with 6 or 7, for versions 6.x or 7.x, respectively. Afterwards, Nginx can now be installed with yum:

yum install nginx

For Debian-based distributions, we need to first use their signing key to authenticate the package signatures. Download the following file first from http://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key.

Then run the following command:

sudo apt-key add nginx_signing.key

With the key added, we can now add the Nginx repository to our sources.list found in /etc/apt/sources.list. For Debian, we add the following lines:

deb http://nginx.org/packages/debian/ codename nginx
deb-src http://nginx.org/packages/debian/ codename nginx

Where codename is either jessie or stretch depending on your version of Debian. For Ubuntu, we use the following dependencies:

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

Where codename is one of trusty, xenial, or zesty depending on your version of Ubuntu. Finally, we can install Nginx with the apt-get command option:

apt-get update
apt-get install nginx