Building nginx from source on mac osx lion

Issues faced while trying to install nginx from source on mac osx lion.

After downloading the latest stable nginx source files I started
to build nginx as instructed on the site .

./configure --conf-path=/etc/nginx --with-http_ssl_module

The first configuration option specifies the location of the nginx.conf file and the second one
ensures that nginx is build with https support for web servers.
There is a wide choice of configuration options that can be found here . 

The configure stage went through well , however when I tried to do a "make" ,
I ended up with the following error :

objs/src/http/modules/ngx_http_upstream_keepalive_module.o \
objs/ngx_modules.o \
-lpcre -lssl -lcrypto -lz

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:

"_pcre_free_study", referenced from:

_ngx_pcre_free_studies in ngx_regex.o

ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64

 "

A bit of search led me to this.

Reason as mentioned in the solution :

"The Mac OS X have /usr/lib/libpcre.0.dylib in base system and strange system search paths, so installing PCRE into /usr/local/ won't work - the pcre.h will be used from /usr/local/include, but libpcre.0.dylib will be used from /usr/lib (not /usr/local/lib)." 

So I uninstalled/removed the existing pcre ( I deleted the pcre libs and header files in the /usr/local/include and usr/local/lib folders) and installed pcre using macports .

Reinstalling leads to the pcre files getting installed in /opt/local folders.

Run the configuration step again , otherwise your old Makefile will still point to

the /usr/local for pcre .

After a successful ./configure , do make and then make install .

And you can find your nginx executable in /usr/local/nginx/sbin ( which is the default

location for you nginx executable unless you configure it differently ).

In my case as I configured my conf path differently , I also had the nginx.conf inside 

/etc/nginx/ folder .

You can of course start nginx pointing it to a different configuration file ( with the -c option ).

In the next posts I will try to document my experiment running nginx , in particular how caching

works.