Why Nginx?
Nginx is a high-performance web and proxy server. It has a lot of features, but it's not for everyone. People generally use Nginx:
As an Apache replacement that gracefully handles many concurrent connections: Nginx is especially popular among web hosting providers. 50,000 simultaneous connections have been reported, thanks to Nginx's use of epoll and kqueue.
As a load-balancing proxy server: Nginx is a popular front-end to Rails and PHP applications, either via FastCGI or HTTP. Written in C, it consumes about a quarter of the CPU that Perlbal uses.
As a mail proxy server: more of a niche application, but fastmail.fm reports great success.
As a server with a simple installation process, a clean configuration file, and few bugs: Nginx is easy to get running, and it almost never needs restarting. You can even upgrade the binary with zero downtime.
To learn more about Nginx's features and performance, check out the Feature Overview and Testimonials pages.
Requirements
gzip module requires zlib library
rewrite module requires pcre library
- ssl support requires openssl library
Download
See the official download page.
Installation
After extracting the source, run these commands from a terminal:
./configure make sudo make install
By default, Nginx will be installed in /usr/local/nginx. You may change this and other options with the compile-time options.
Platform-specific Notes and Builds
Running Nginx
Start the server by running /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx as root. After editing the configuration file at /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf to your liking, you can reload the configuration with:
kill -HUP `cat /usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid`
The location of nginx.pid might be different on your machine. For Ubuntu, it is located at:
/var/run/nginx.pid
See also:
Running and Controlling Nginx for more command-line options and process signals
Nginx modules for a configuration reference
Nginx cookbook for solutions to common problems
Nginx community if you still can't find the answers to your questions