Convert SolusVM from Lighttpd to Nginx

Historically the brilliant SolusVM VPS control panel have used the Lighttpd web server on their master and slave nodes, however it is now possible to use the popular Nginx as an alternative web-server.

I’m a big fan of the performance and flexibly of Nginx, not to mention that in my opinion the Nginx configuration files are just much easier to write and maintain than Lighttpd.

Thanks to a nice, easy to use installation script, the process of converting the SolusVM master server/node from Lighttpd to Nginx, just requires running the following commands:

wget http://files.soluslabs.com/solusvm/nginx/nginx-master-el5-x86_64
chmod 755 nginx-master-el5-x86_64
./nginx-master-el5-x86_64

And to convert each of your SolusVM slave servers/nodes from Lighttpd to Nginx, it’s just as simple:

wget http://files.soluslabs.com/solusvm/nginx/nginx-slave-el5-x86_64
chmod 755 nginx-slave-el5-x86_64
./nginx-slave-el5-x86_64

Both of these examples assume that you are running your SolusVM master and slave servers/nodes on a 64-bit CentOS 5.x system, however if you are using CentOS 6.x then just substitute “el6” for “el5” in each of these commands.

As part of the installation process, a new self signed SSL certificate will be generated for Nginx, leaving the original SSL certificate used by Lighttpd in it’s place in case you need to roll back for any reason. The roll back is simply a case of stopping and disabling the Nginx and Spawn-FCGI services before re-enabling and starting the Lighttpd service:

chkconfig nginx off
chkconfig spawn-fcgi off
chkconfig lighttpd on
service nginx stop
service lighttpd start