If you’d like to upgrade running Nginx on your Unix server version read on for some information on how to achieve it.
Nginx Web Server
Digital Ocean has a fairly complex tutorial on upgrading Nginx without losing client connections. Here’s an alternate method which seems to automate their recommendation, though I can’t say for sure that it actually works, but Nginx does seem to be upgraded after I followed these steps. Of course you’ll need to alter the versions to match what’s available when you do this.
Download the software
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.15.8.tar.gz git clone https://github.com/openresty/headers-more-nginx-module.git wget http://labs.frickle.com/files/ngx_cache_purge-2.3.tar.gz
Unpack the software
tar -xzf nginx-1.15.8.tar.gz tar -xzf ngx_cache_purge-2.3.tar.gz
Build the software
cd nginx-1.15.8 ./configure --prefix=/etc/nginx --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log --http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log --pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid --lock-path=/var/run/nginx.lock --http-client-body-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/client_temp --http-proxy-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/proxy_temp --http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/fastcgi_temp --http-uwsgi-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/uwsgi_temp --http-scgi-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/scgi_temp --user=nginx --group=nginx --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_realip_module --with-http_gunzip_module --with-http_gzip_static_module --with-threads --with-file-aio --with-http_v2_module --with-cc-opt='-O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m64 -mtune=native' --add-module=../ngx_cache_purge-2.3 --add-module=../headers-more-nginx-module make make install make upgrade # (this swaps to the new version of Nginx) make clean # (optional, removes unnecessary files for the build)
You can then delete the whole tree if you like. I delete the uncompressed versions and keep the downloaded files, so I know what I build.
Here’s the output from “make upgrade”
make upgrade /usr/sbin/nginx -t nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful kill -USR2 `cat /var/run/nginx.pid` sleep 1 test -f /var/run/nginx.pid.oldbin kill -QUIT `cat /var/run/nginx.pid.oldbin`
There you have it, a simple way to upgrade a running Nginx install, hopefully not dropping connections.