The prebuilt Nginx package on Ubuntu has a number of alternatives. Each of them allows you to fine tune the Nginx installation for your system.

The primary source for Nginx for an English-speaking audience is Nginx.org. Open http://nginx.org/en/download.html in your browser and choose the most recent stable version of Nginx. Download the chosen archive into a directory of your choice (/usr/local or /usr/src are common directories to use for compiling software):

$ wget -q http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.7.9.tar.gz

Extract the files from the downloaded archive and change to the directory corresponding to the chosen version of Nginx:

$ tar xf nginx-1.7.9.tar.gz
$ cd nginx-1.7.9

To configure the source code, we need to run the ./configure script included in the archive:

$ ./configure
checking for OS
 + Linux 3.13.0-36-generic i686
checking for C compiler ... found
+ using GNU C compiler
[...]

This script will produce a lot of output and, if successful, will generate a Makefile file for the source files.

Notice that we showed the non-privileged user prompt $ instead of the root # in the previous command lines. You are encouraged to configure and compile software as a regular user and only install as root. This will prevent a lot of problems related to access restriction while working with the source code.

You can build the source files now using the following command:

$ make

You'll see a lot of output on compilation. If build is successful, you can install the Nginx file on your system. Before doing that, make sure you escalate your privileges to the super user so that the installation script can install the necessary files into the system areas and assign necessary privileges. Once successful, run the make install command:

# make install

The preceding command will install all the necessary files on your system. The following table lists all locations of the Nginx files that will be created after running this command and their purposes:

Nginx must be ready to use now. To start Nginx, change your working directory to the /usr/local/nginx directory and run the following command:

# sbin/nginx

This will start Nginx on your system with the default configuration.

Occasionally you might want to amend Nginx binary from a prebuilt packages with your own changes. In order to do that you need to reproduce the build tree that was used to compile Nginx binary for the prebuilt package.

But how would you know what version of Nginx and what configuration script options were used at the build time? Fortunately, Nginx has a solution for that. Just run the existing Nginx binary with the -V command-line option. Nginx will print the configure-time options. This is shown in the following:

$ /usr/sbin/nginx -V
nginx version: nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)
built by gcc 4.8.2 (Ubuntu 4.8.2-19ubuntu1)
TLS SNI support enabled
configure arguments: --with-cc-opt='-g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2' --with-ld-opt='-Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro' …

Using the output of the preceding command, reproduce the entire build environment, including the Nginx source tree of the corresponding version and modules that were included into the build.

You might even want to reproduce the version of the compiler used in order to produce a binary-identical Nginx executable file (we will discuss this later when discussing how to troubleshoot crashes).

Once this is done, run the ./configure script of your Nginx source tree with options from the output of the -V option (with necessary alterations) and follow the remaining steps of the build procedure. You will get an altered Nginx executable on the objs/ folder of the source tree.

This folder contains the main configuration file and a set of parameter files. The following table describes the purpose of each of the default parameter files:

The default configuration contains references to this site as root. It is not recommended that you use this directory for real sites, as it is not a good practice for the Nginx folders hierarchy to contain the site hierarchy. Use this directory for testing purposes or for serving auxiliary files.

This is the location of virtual host configuration files. The recommended structure of this folder is to have one file per virtual host in this folder or one folder per virtual host, containing all files related to this virtual host. In this way, you will always know which files were used and which are now being used, and what each of the files contain and which files can be purged.

This is the location for Nginx log files. The default access log file and error log file will be written to this location. For installation from source files, it is not recommended that you use the default location /usr/local/nginx/logs for real sites. Instead, make sure all your log files are stored in the system log file location, such as /var/log/nginx, to provide better overview and management of your log files.

Nginx uses temporary files for receiving large request bodies, and proxies large files from upstream. Files that are created for this purpose can be found in this folder.