nginx on Solaris

We’re continuing our evaluation of TextDrive / Joyent Accelerators, and things are going well. Tech support is responsive to my odd requests, the forums are lively, and the system itself is quite speedy.

Tonight we’re installing nginx as the load balancing proxy for our Rails applications. It’s been personally recommended to us several times, battle tested by a few independent folks who are into these sorts of things, and received a lot of good press in the Rails community — and it’s mysteriously Russian. So, we’re quite interested to take it for a spin on our Accelerator.

First, there isn’t a Blastwave package for nginx, so we built from the tarball (which requires the PCRE sources). It’s a pretty simple, although it took some troubleshooting. The snag was that the PCRE build used tools that weren’t in my default $PATH, but were in /usr/ccs/bin.

So:

$ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin


… and then we’re off to the races:

$ wget http://sysoev.ru/nginx/nginx-x.x.x.tar.gz
$ wget ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre-x.x.tar.gz
$ gtar zxf nginx-x.x.x.tar.gz pcre-x.x.tar.gz
$ cd nginx-x.x.x
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/nginx --with-pcre=../pcre-x.x
$ make
$ sudo make install


PS: Rails 1.2.3 was released today. And, happy birthday, Mom!