Enabling modules

By default, not every module for NGINX has been compiled and is available. As of version 1.9.11 (released in February 2016), NGINX added dynamic modules, similar to the Dynamic Shared Objects (DSO) like the Apache HTTP server.

Previous NGINX build process

Previous to this, you needed to recompile NGINX every time you updated a module, so this is a big step forward. Being statically compiled into the main binary also meant that each instance of NGINX loaded all the modules internally, regardless of whether you needed them or not. This is why the mail modules were never compiled in with the standard binaries.

NGINX new dynamic modules

How to do it...

However, even though 1.9.11 added the dynamic modules, none of the standard modules are dynamic by default. To make them into dynamic modules, you'll need to update the configure options. For example, to make the mail module dynamic, update --with-mail to --with-mail=dynamic.

The main nginx.conf configuration file will then need the following:

load_module "modules/ngx_mail_module.so";

Official Link: https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/extending/

See also

There are a number of third-party modules for NGINX, some of which we'll be using later in this book and can be found at https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/modules/.