How to install Nginx via YUM in CentOS

Nginx (pronounced “Engine X”) is a lightweight web server that offers speed and flexibility without all of the extra features that larger web servers like Apache offer. Although it is a free and open source application, CentOS does not offer the latest version in its default YUM repository. To install it, you need to add the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository, which is part of the Fedora Project.

1. Install the EPEL repository:

# rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5Server/x86_64/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

2. Install nginx

# yum install nginx

3. You will be asked to install the gpg-key for EPEL. Answer yes

4. Start Nginx

# /etc/init.d/nginx start

5. Check the installation by going to your web server’s default site, either using your ip address or domain name.

Web server round-up

Over the past year, we have discussed several web servers. For your convenience, here is a quick list of each one we have already mentioned, as well as a couple we did not, including links to their project sites.

Apache – This is the most widely used and the one we have spent the most time covering. It is free and open source and runs on nearly every platform available. It is released under the Apache license.

Microsoft IIS – As Microsoft’s proprietary web server, it only comes with and works on Windows. If for some reason you have to run this but do not have Windows, you will have to consider virtualization.

Sun Java System Web Server – This is Sun’s proprietary web server technology that is primarily intended for Sun appliances. Nevertheless, it is cross-platform, and Sun recently opened some of its code under a BSD license.

Ngnix – This is a lightweight web server that runs on both Unix and Windows machines. It has become the fourth most popular HTTP server and is available under a BSD-style license.

Lighttpd – This lightweight HTTP server is designed to take on heavy loads while maintaining a good balance, low memory and CPU usage. It powers YouTube, Wikipedia, and many other high-traffic sites. It is free and open source under a BSD style license.

Photo: Flickr

Net Craft Releases Web Survey Results

Internet services company Netcraft released its monthly web server survey yesterday, aptly titled June 2009 Web Server Survey.

The survey monitored some 238,027,855 sites over the last month. It tracked a wide variety of things, including server platform market share and the number of websites hosted by these servers, which increased dramatically.

More servers are running Apache than any other platform with other industry players like Sun and Microsoft making very little headway in catching up. One platform, nginx, did climb 1%, mainly because it is used by blog hosts like WordPress, which have seen an explosion in users recently.

Apache is so popular because it is free, open-source, and easy to customize for use in a variety of scenarios. Chances are very high your host is running it.

Photo: Flickr