NGINX & ngx_pagespeed on CentOS 7

I wanted to have a quick play with Googles Pagespeed module, as I use NGINX and not Apache I needed to compile NGINX from source to enable the ngx_pagespeed module. The following assumes you are have a clean CentOS 7 installation.

First off you need to install the packages which enable you to compile NGINX with ngx_pagespeed from source.

Now create a NGINX user and make so the user doesn’t have a shell.

Once the required packages have been installed and have created the NGINX user it’s time to grab a copy of the ngx_pagespeed and psol source code. See https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed/releases↗ for latest release details.

Now grab the latest version of NGINX. See http://nginx.org/en/download.html↗ for details on the latest release.

Now you have the source its time to configure NGIX and compile

Now you have NGINX compiled and installed on your server. While you could manage the process manually it’s best to create an init script. As CentOS 7 uses systemd you need to create a service file in /usr/lib/systemd/system/.

If everything has gone as expected you should have NGINX running your server with the ngx_pagespeed module also loaded. Now you will to do playing with ngx_pagespeed, first of all create a cache directory and make sure that NGINX can read and write to it;

then add some directives to your NGINX virtual host block. I used to the following for my tests;