Install Nginx on Mac OS from source

no Homebrew required

1. Download Nginx

$ cd /usr/local/src
$ curl -OL http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.12.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf nginx-1.12.2.tar.gz && rm nginx-1.12.2.tar.gz

2. Download the PCRE library

The PCRE library distribution (version 4.4 — 8.41) needs to be downloaded from the PCRE site and extracted. The rest is done by nginx’s ./configure and make. PCRE is required for the http_rewrite_module, and also for regular expressions support in the location directive.

$ curl -OL https://ftp.pcre.org/pub/pcre/pcre-8.41.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf pcre-8.41.tar.gz && rm pcre-8.41.tar.gz

3. Configure Nginx

See the full list of ./configure options: http://nginx.org/en/docs/configure.html.

$ cd nginx-1.12.2/

Compile nginx without SSL support

$ ./configure --with-pcre=../pcre-8.41/ 

with SSL support

Download OpenSSL sources and extract:

$ curl -OL https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.1.0g.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf openssl-1.1.0g.tar.gz && rm openssl-1.1.0g.tar.gz 

Compile Nginx:

$ cd ../nginx-1.12.2/
$ ./configure --with-pcre=../pcre-8.41/ --with-http_ssl_module --with-openssl=/usr/local/src/openssl-1.1.0g

4. Install Nginx

$ [sudo] make && make install

Add the nginx binary to $PATH:

export PATH="/usr/local/nginx/sbin:$PATH"