Tag Archives: Load Balancer

Install updated version of nginx on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04LTS

Nginx is a great web server to handle tons of traffic with relative low resources, it beats Apache big time.

I have started using  it as a Reverse Proxy, Load Balancer, Web Cache and static files web server (like images, javascript and CSS) in front of Apache (for PHP processing). I’m more than amazed with the results.

The problem is that Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 comes with Nginx version 0.5 (version 1.0 has been recently released), and lacks of some features as Cache. An easy way to update the version to a more recent one (currently, to 0.8) without upgrading the whole Ubuntu version is using the following PPA repository: https://launchpad.net/~meto/+archive/nconfig

To add this repository to your system, you need to create a file inside /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ (for instance, nginx-stable.list) with the following content:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/meto/nconfig/ubuntu hardy main 
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/meto/nconfig/ubuntu hardy main

Then, you need to add the key of the repository to your system:

apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys ED283389

Finally, run:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

You should be prompted about a newer version of nginx, say yes, and that’s it, enjoy ;).