Installing Nginx from source on Debian

Installing Nginx on Debian is easy, but that may be outdated. Since Debian is stable Linux distribution, we cannot blame them for this. That’s why we are going to install Nginx from source on Debian.

1. Refresh the Debian system once.

sudo apt update

2. Installing needed packages.

sudo apt install curl gnupg2 ca-certificates lsb-release debian-archive-keyring -y

3. Import an official nginx signing key so apt could verify the packages authenticity. Fetch the key:

curl https://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key | gpg --dearmor \
    | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/nginx-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null

4. Verify that the downloaded file contains the proper key:

gpg --dry-run --quiet --no-keyring --import --import-options import-show /usr/share/keyrings/nginx-archive-keyring.gpg

The output should contain the full fingerprint as follows:

pub   rsa2048 2011-08-19 [SC] [expires: 2024-06-14]
      573BFD6B3D8FBC641079A6ABABF5BD827BD9BF62
uid                      nginx signing key <signing-key@nginx.com>

5. Choose which package to install — stable or mainline.

My suggestion would be stable for production and mainline for development only.

Either use stable (slow update but stable)

To set up the apt repository for stable nginx packages, run the following command:

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nginx-archive-keyring.gpg] \
http://nginx.org/packages/debian `lsb_release -cs` nginx" \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nginx.list

Or use mainline (it always updates)

If you would like to use mainline nginx packages, run the following command instead:

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nginx-archive-keyring.gpg] \
http://nginx.org/packages/mainline/debian `lsb_release -cs` nginx" \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nginx.list

6. Set up repository pinning to prefer our packages over distribution-provided ones:

echo -e "Package: *\nPin: origin nginx.org\nPin: release o=nginx\nPin-Priority: 900\n" \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/99nginx

7. To install nginx, run the following commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install nginx

Now use the Nginx webserver for any application and website.