The NGINX's RAM-only Jail. Adding nginx to RAM-only diskless Linux box

Without any doubt, nginx is one of the best ever created HTTP servers, it solves the C10K problem with an elegant event-drive architecture. Many big sites around the WWW use it: Wikipedia, Hyves, etc.

This is a how to prepare your rambox to run nginx smoothly. It makes sense only after the preparation of the RAM-only PXE boot in my previous post. This post isn't about any kind of nginx optimization stuff beside of its compilation in a single binary rock. At the end of this guide, you will be running the nginx very much like in a jail.

Run these steps BEFORE the step "Change ownership to everything" at RAM-only PXE boot in my previous post.

1. Download latest stable version nginx and upack it.

$ pushd /tmp/wrk
$ ngx=nginx-1.2.1.tar.gz
$ cache $ngx http://nginx.org/download/$ngx
$ tar -xvzf /tmp/cache/$ngx -C .
$ mv $ngx nginx

2. Add options depending on the features that you want to support. Beside of the default options I only add static compilation options:

$ pushd nginx
$ ./configure --with-ld-opt="-static -static-libgcc" \
  --with-cc-opt="-static -static-libgcc"

make it (jN means N threads devoted to compilation and linking):


$ make -j2

ensure that it's not a dynamic executable:


$ ldd objs/nginx
 not a dynamic executable
$ popd

3. Copy the nginx executable to rambox's /sbin :

   $ popd 
   $ pushd sbin
   $ chmod +w .
   $ cp ../../nginx/objs/nginx .
   $ chmod -w .
   $ popd
   

4. Create /usr/local/nginx directories:

$ mkdir -p -m 0755 usr/local/nginx/{conf,logs}

5. Copy some needed libs:

$ chmod +w lib
$ cp /lib64/{ld-2.12.so,ld-linux-x86-64.so.2} lib/
$ cp /lib64/{libc-2.12.so,libc.so.6} lib/
$ cp /lib64/{libnsl-2.12.so,libnsl.so.1} lib/
$ cp /lib64/{libnss_compat-2.12.so,libnss_compat.so.2} lib/
$ chmod -w lib

6. Copy mime conf file:

$ cp ../nginx/conf/mime.types usr/local/nginx/conf/

7. Create the nginx.conf file with some basic settings:

$ dd of=usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf << EOT
# user and group to run nginx
user www www;

# numbers of dedicated CPUs
worker_processes 1;

# pid archive
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    # max connections in WAIT 
    worker_connections  128;
  
    # accept & enqueue NEW connections, put them in WAIT
    multi_accept        on;
}

http {
        include       mime.types;
        default_type  application/octet-stream;

        server {
                listen 80;

                autoindex on;
 
                location / {
                        root /var/www;
                        index  index.php index.html index.htm;
                }
        }
}
EOT

8. Resume the rambox creation process and once it gets started run:

$ nginx

Enjoy it by browsing at http://HOSTADDRESS

Post install steps

Daemonize nginx by running it at /init script!