Deploy Nginx on CentOS 6

Overview

Nginx is designed for high performance and efficient system resource usage. These may not seem important when you first start out, but as your application scales to thousands of concurrent users, every millisecond of response time and every megabyte of memory starts to count. If your server software isn’t using resources efficiently, you may severely limit the amount of users your server can handle before your app starts feeling slugish.

Another benefit of Nginx is its ease of configuration and use. The configuration files are easy to understand and use plain english. This means less time is used up refining and optimizing the configuration, and more time deploying applications.

Most sites use Nginx as a proxy, serving up static content and then forwarding requests to dynamic content hosted Apache servers. However, recent versions of Nginx are now capable of FastCGI processing, allowing it to host dynamic content powered by PHP, Python, and many others.

Install Nginx

As of the date of this articile, Nginx is not in CentOS’s default repositories. This leaves us with two choices: build it from source or add the Nginx repository to install it using YUM.

Install From Repository

Navigate to /etc/yum.repos.d
Create a repo configuration file for Nginx
```
vi nginx.repo
```

Add the following lines to nginx.conf

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

Save changes and exit the text editor.
Install Nginx
```
yum install nginx
```

Install Nginx From Source

Ensure you have the required development packages installed on your system. They will be need to compile the source files.
```
yum groupinstall "development tools"
```
Download the latest version from Nginx’s website uring wget. The latest version at the time of this tutorial is 1.5.8.
```
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.5.8.tar.gz
```
Untar the downloaded file.
```
tar -xvf nginx-1.5.8.tar.gz
```
Navigate into the new nginx directory
```
cd nginx-1.5.8
```
To enable the rewrite module, install the PCRE development package.
```
yum install pcre-devel
```
To enabled GZip capabilities, install the zlib developement package.
```
yum install zlib-devel
```
Prepare the source files to be compiled on your server.
```
./configure
```
Compile Nginx from the source files
```
make install
```

Copy the new Nginx binary to /usr/sbin

cp /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx /usr/sbin/nginx

Make the Nginx directory in /etc
```
mkdir -p /etc/nginx
```

Copy the nginx.conf template into /etc/nginx

cp /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Copy the mime.types template into /etc/nginx

cp /usr/local/gninx/conf/mime.types /etc/nginx

Create the Nginx service account
```
useradd --shell /sbin/nologin nginx
```
Create the Nginx log directory
```
mkdir -p /var/log/nginx
```
Create an Nginx startup script file.
```
touch /etc/init.d/nginx
```

Open the startup script into a text editor and add the following lines

#!/bin/sh
#
# nginx        Startup script for nginx
#
# chkconfig: - 85 15
# processname: nginx
# config: /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
# config: /etc/sysconfig/nginx
# pidfile: /var/run/nginx.pid
# description: nginx is an HTTP and reverse proxy server
#
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: nginx
# Required-Start: $local_fs $remote_fs $network
# Required-Stop: $local_fs $remote_fs $network
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: start and stop nginx
### END INIT INFO

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/nginx ]; then
    . /etc/sysconfig/nginx
fi

prog=nginx
nginx=${NGINX-/usr/sbin/nginx}
conffile=${CONFFILE-/etc/nginx/nginx.conf}
lockfile=${LOCKFILE-/var/lock/subsys/nginx}
pidfile=${PIDFILE-/var/run/nginx.pid}
SLEEPMSEC=100000
RETVAL=0

start() {
    echo -n $"Starting $prog: "

    daemon --pidfile=${pidfile} ${nginx} -c ${conffile}
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
    [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch ${lockfile}
    return $RETVAL
}

stop() {
    echo -n $"Stopping $prog: "
    killproc -p ${pidfile} ${prog}
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
    [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f ${lockfile} ${pidfile}
}

reload() {
    echo -n $"Reloading $prog: "
    killproc -p ${pidfile} ${prog} -HUP
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
}

upgrade() {
    oldbinpidfile=${pidfile}.oldbin

    configtest -q || return 6
    echo -n $"Staring new master $prog: "
    killproc -p ${pidfile} ${prog} -USR2
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
    /bin/usleep $SLEEPMSEC
    if [ -f ${oldbinpidfile} -a -f ${pidfile} ]; then
        echo -n $"Graceful shutdown of old $prog: "
        killproc -p ${oldbinpidfile} ${prog} -QUIT
        RETVAL=$?
        echo
    else
        echo $"Upgrade failed!"
        return 1
    fi
}

configtest() {
    if [ "$#" -ne 0 ] ; then
        case "$1" in
            -q)
                FLAG=$1
                ;;
            *)
                ;;
        esac
        shift
    fi
    ${nginx} -t -c ${conffile} $FLAG
    RETVAL=$?
    return $RETVAL
}

rh_status() {
    status -p ${pidfile} ${nginx}
}

# See how we were called.
case "$1" in
    start)
        rh_status >/dev/null 2>&1 && exit 0
        start
        ;;
    stop)
        stop
        ;;
    status)
        rh_status
        RETVAL=$?
        ;;
    restart)
        configtest -q || exit $RETVAL
        stop
        start
        ;;
    upgrade)
        upgrade
        ;;
    condrestart|try-restart)
        if rh_status >/dev/null 2>&1; then
            stop
            start
        fi
        ;;
    force-reload|reload)
        reload
        ;;
    configtest)
        configtest
        ;;
    *)
        echo $"Usage: $prog {start|stop|restart|condrestart|try-restart|force-reload|upgrade|reload|status|help|configtest}"
        RETVAL=2
esac

exit $RETVAL

Open the Nginx configuration file into a text editor and modify the highlighted areas to match your system..

user  nginx;

# Set value to number of process cores
worker_processes  2;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    gzip  on;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

Test your install by starting the Nginx daemon
```
service nginx start
```

Configure Nginx

Open the Nginx configuration file
```
vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
```
Modify the worker_process value to reflect the number of processor cores installed in the server.
```
worker_processes 2
```
To enable gzip compression, find the following line:
```
#gzip on
```
And uncomment it
```
gzip on
```
Save changes and exit the text editor.
Restart the Nginx daemon to apply your changes.
```
service nginx restart
```
Configure Nginx to automatically start after reboot.
```
chkconfig nginx on
```

Configure The Default Website

Open the default website configuration file.
```
vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
```
To set the listening port, find the following line and modify it’s value:
```
listen 80;
```
Set the DNS hostname of your website by finding the following line and replacing localhost with the name of your server.
```
server_name localhost;
```
The default website root directory is /usr/share/nginx/html. To change it, find the following lines and replace the highlighted value with the desired file path.
```
location / { 
     root /usr/share/nginx/html; 
     index index.html index.htm; 
}
```
To modify the default index file, add to or replace the values listed next to index.
Save changes and exit the text editor.

Configure Firewall To Allow HTTP Access

Run the following command to allow HTTP access through IPTables.

iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -P tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

To permanently save the firewall rule, run the following command.
```
/sbin/service iptables save
```

Conclusion

You now have a web server capable of server content very quickly. However, this deployment will only be capable of serving static files, like HTML, Javascript, and CSS. In a future tutorial, I will walk you through configuring Nginx for PHP.

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