This approach to the download process will lead us to discover the various resources at the disposal of server administrators—websites, communities, and wikis all relating to Nginx. We will also quickly discuss the different version branches available to you, and eventually select the most appropriate one for your setup.
Although Nginx is a relatively new and growing project, there are already a good number of resources available on the World Wide Web (WWW) and an active community of administrators and developers.
The official website, which is at www.nginx.org, looks rather bare and does not provide a tremendous amount of information or documentation, other than links for downloading the latest versions. On the contrary, you will find a lot of interesting documentation and examples on the official wiki, wiki.nginx.org, seen below:
The wiki provides a large variety of documentation and configuration examples, and it may prove very useful to you in many situations. Moreover, it can be edited by its (registered) users, which is a great help towards keeping the documentation up-to-date. If you have specific questions though, you might as well use the forums—forum.nginx.org. An active community of users will answer your questions in no time. Additionally, the Nginx mailing list, which is relayed on the Nginx forum, will also prove to be an excellent resource for any question you may have. And if you need direct assistance, there is always a bunch of regulars helping each other out on the IRC channel #Nginx on irc.freenode.net.
Another interesting source of information—the blogosphere. A simple query on your favorite search engine should return a good amount of blog articles documenting Nginx, its configuration, and modules.
Personal websites and blogs documenting Nginx
It's now time to head over to the official website and get started with downloading the source code for compiling and installing Nginx. Before you do so, let us have a quick summary of the available versions and the features that come with them.
Igor Sysoev, a talented Russian developer and server administrator, initiated this open source project back in 2002. Between the first release in 2004 and the current version, the market share of Nginx has been growing steadily. It now serves over 15 percent of websites on the Internet, according to a May 2013 Netcraft.com survey. The features are plenty and render the application both powerful and flexible at the same time.
There are currently three version branches on the project:
Stable version: This version is usually recommended, as it is approved by both developers and users, but is usually a little behind the development version.
Development version: This is the latest version available for download. Although it is generally solid enough to be installed on production servers, you may run into the occasional bug. As such, the stable version is recommended, even though you do not get to use the latest features.
Legacy version: If, for some reason, you are interested in looking at the older versions, you will find several of them.
A recurrent question regarding development versions is "are they stable enough to be used on production servers?" Cliff Wells, founder and maintainer of the nginx.org wiki website and community, believes so—"I generally use and recommend the latest development version. It's only bit me once!" Early adopters rarely report critical problems. It is up to you to select the version you will be using on your server, knowing that the instructions given in this book should be valid regardless of the release as the Nginx developers have decided to maintain overall backwards compatibility in new versions. You can find more information on version changes, new additions, and bug fixes in the dedicated change log page on the official website.
As of the stable version 1.2.9, Nginx offers an impressive variety of features, which, contrary to what the title of this book indicates, are not all related to serving HTTP content. Here is a list of the main features of the web branch, quoted from the official website www.nginx.org:
Handling of static files, index files, and autoindexing; open file descriptor cache.
Accelerated reverse proxying with caching; simple load balancing and fault tolerance.
Accelerated support with caching of remote FastCGI servers; simple load balancing and fault tolerance.
Modular architecture. Filters include Gzipping, byte ranges, chunked responses, XSLT, SSI, and image resizing filter. Multiple SSI inclusions within a single page can be processed in parallel if they are handled by FastCGI or proxied servers.
SSL and TLS SNI support (TLS with Server Name Indication (SNI), required for using TLS on a server doing virtual hosting).
Nginx can also be used as a mail proxy server, although this aspect is not closely documented in the book:
User redirection to IMAP/POP3 backend using an external HTTP authentication server
User authentication using an external HTTP authentication server and connection redirection to an internal SMTP backend
Authentication methods:
POP3: USER/PASS, APOP, AUTH LOGIN/PLAIN/CRAM-MD5
IMAP: LOGIN, AUTH LOGIN/PLAIN/CRAM-MD5
SMTP: AUTH LOGIN/PLAIN/CRAM-MD5
SSL support
STARTTLS and STLS support
Nginx is compatible with many computer architectures and operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD, and Solaris. The application runs fine on 32- and 64-bit architectures.
Once you have made your choice as to which version you will be using, head over to www.nginx.org and find the URL of the file you wish to download. Position yourself in your home directory, which will contain the source code to be compiled, and download the file using wget:
[[email protected] ~]$ mkdir src && cd src [[email protected] src]$ wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.2.9.tar.gz
We will be using version 1.2.9, the latest stable version as of April, 2013. Once downloaded, extract the archive contents in the current folder:
[[email protected] src]$ tar zxf nginx-1.2.9.tar.gz
You have successfully downloaded and extracted Nginx. Now, the next step will be to configure the compilation process in order to obtain a binary that perfectly fits your operating system.