Finding and installing third-party modules

As with many open source projects, there is an active developer community surrounding NGINX. Thanks to NGINX's modular nature, this community is able to develop and publish modules to provide additional functionality. They cover a wide range of applications, so it pays to take a look at what is available before embarking on developing your own module.

The procedure for installing a third-party module is fairly straightforward:

1. Locate the module you would like to use (either search on https://github.com or see http://wiki.nginx.org/3rdPartyModules).
2. Download the module.
3. Unpack the source.
4. Read the README file, if included. See if there are any dependencies that you will need to install.
5. Configure NGINX to use the module as follows:

   ./configure --add-module=<path>

This procedure will give you an nginx binary with the additional functionality of that module.

Keep in mind that many third-party modules are of an experimental nature. Test using a module first before rolling it out on production systems and remember that the mainline releases of NGINX may have API changes that can cause problems with third-party modules.