Compiling Nginx on Debian and Ubuntu

Most of the time, there is no need to compile Nginx manually as Debian and Ubuntu provide several packages being compiled with a different set of modules (for details, see: Nginx packages in Debian stable). However, when performing more specific testing tasks, I sometimes need an exact particular version and have to compile it manually.

So here are the required steps to build Nginx with SSL and SPDY modules enabled.

Installing development packages:

apt-get install build-essential libpcre3-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev

Compiling Nginx:

wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.6.1.tar.gz
tar xvfz nginx-1.6.1.tar.gz
cd nginx-1.6.1
./configure --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_spdy_module
make && make install

Checking compile time options:

nginx -V
nginx version: nginx/1.6.1
built by gcc 4.7.2 (Debian 4.7.2-5)
TLS SNI support enabled
configure arguments: --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_spdy_module

Lastly, here is a guide on how to compile Nginx on FreeBSD.