nginx install on debian



It took ages to try, and find a guide that actually helps with installing Nginx on a Debian system. Most either involve compiling from source or are incomplete to the point of leaving you with a useless system.

So there are a number of steps to take to get Nginx up and running on a Debian system, and I will cover my way here.

Step 1 – sources.list

First step is to get the sources for Nginx and php5-fpm into your apt source list. To do this you need to add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

# NGinX Sources
deb http://nginx.org/packages/debian/ squeeze nginx deb-src
http://nginx.org/packages/debian/ squeeze nginx

# DotDeb Sources - php-fpm
deb http://dotdeb.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/ stable all deb-src
http://dotdeb.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/ stable all

Once you have done this the first impulse is to run aptitude update, don’t, it will fail and complain at you that there are no valid keys for the Nginx or dotdeb sources.

Step 2 – apt keys

So the next step is to set up the crypto keys that allow the new apt packages to be checked and trusted.

Nginx With Nginx you need to download their signing key, to do this run the following command:

$ wget http://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
$ sudo apt-key add nginx_signing.key

Drop the sudo if you are running as root (shouldn’t be but just in case). This will add the key to your apt keychain and allow for verification of the packages you download.

php5-fpm php-fpm is the same, run the following command to add the signing key for the dotdeb repository.

$ wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg
$ sudo apt-key add dotdeb.gpg

Once all this is done feel free to go ahead and run aptitude update

Step 3 – aptitude install

So we have all the required apt repositories set up, now it’s time to install a server stack. So what you do next depends on what you are intending to run on your server. I run Nginx primarily for WHMCS installations as it makes the most out of the VPS boxes my clients used to run it. For a WHMCS installation you need a few components:

So for this I would go ahead and run:

$ sudo aptitude install \
  nginx mysql-server-5.5 mysql-client-5.5 php5-fpm \
  php5-curl php5-gd php5-mysql php5-imap

This will set up nginx with php5-fpm adding in the required modules, for a stripped down set up that doesn’t include any extras try:

$ sudo aptitude install \
  nginx mysql-server-5.5 mysql-client-5.5 php5-fpm php5-mysql

You can even get rid of the mysql packages if you have no plans to run an sql server.

Step 4 – Configuration

The last stage in sorting out your Nginx install is the configuration files. Check out my post on configuring Nginx .

Conclusion

Nginx is a very efficient and fast web server that when coupled with php-fpm provides a great platform for high traffic web applications. With this guide it is now easy to install and get up and running with a basic configuration.