installing the latest nginx on OS X

I've read a lot about nginx lately and wanted to test its performance for our up-and-coming Ruby on Rails CRM application. It looked very easy to setup and easily configurable (especially with this). My first attempt was installing it through MacPorts, but that didn't fly, as I received the unpleasant "dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libpcre.0.dylib". Turns out I had the same problem when trying to execute after building straight from source (which happened to be a newer version).

So with MacPorts I installed pcre 7.2_0, deactivated 7.0_0, created the symlink as "sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libpcre.0.dylib /usr/local/lib/" and was then able to start up nginx from the source build. Unfortunately the generated configuration file I am using expected a user and group for "nginx". A quick work around for that was to just reference myself instead. Here's what I ended up with (awaiting tweaks and optimizations):

#user and group to run as
user  russ russ;

# number of nginx workers
worker_processes  2;

# pid of nginx master process
pid        logs/nginx.pid;

# Number of worker connections. 1024 is a good default
events {
 worker_connections  1024;
}

# start the http module where we config http access.
http {
 # pull in mime-types. You can break out your config
 # into as many include's as you want to make it cleaner
 include       conf/mime.types;

 # set a default type for the rare situation that
 # nothing matches from the mimie-type include
 default_type  application/octet-stream;

 # configure log format
 log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] $status '
                 '"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                 '"$http_user_agent" "http_x_forwarded_for"';

 # main access log
 access_log  logs/access.log  main;

 # main error log
 error_log  logs/error.log debug;
 #error_log logs/error.log debug_http;

 # no sendfile on OSX
 sendfile        on;

 # These are good default values.
 tcp_nopush        on;
 tcp_nodelay       off;
 # output compression saves bandwidth
 gzip            on;
 gzip_http_version 1.0;
 gzip_comp_level 2;
 gzip_proxied any;
 gzip_types      text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml
                  application/xml+rss text/javascript;

 # this is where you define your mongrel clusters.
 # you need one of these blocks for each cluster
 # and each one needs its own name to refer to it later.
 upstream vscrm {
   server 127.0.0.1:8000;
   server 127.0.0.1:8001;
   server 127.0.0.1:8002;
 }

 # the server directive is nginx's virtual host directive.
 server {
   # port to listen on. Can also be set to an IP:PORT
   listen       80;

   # sets the domain[s] that this vhost server requests for
   server_name  vscrm;

   # doc root
   root /home/russ/forge/svn/vscrm/trunk/public;

   # vhost specific access log
   access_log  logs/vscrm.access.log  main;

   #Set the max size for file uploads to 50Mb
   client_max_body_size  50M;

   # this rewrites all the requests to the maintenance.html
   # page if it exists in the doc root. This is for capistrano's
   # disable web task
   if (-f $document_root/maintenance.html){
     rewrite  ^(.*)$  /maintenance.html last;
     break;
   }

   if ($host ~* "www") {
     rewrite ^(.*)$ http://vscrm$1 redirect;
     break;
   }

   location / {


     # needed to forward user's IP address to rails
     proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;

     # needed for HTTPS
     proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
     proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
     proxy_redirect false;
     proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

     # check for index.html for directory index
     # if its there on the filesystem then rewite
     # the url to add /index.html to the end of it
     # and then break to send it to the next config rules.
     if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
       rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
     }

     # this is the meat of the rails page caching config
     # it adds .html to the end of the url and then checks
     # the filesystem for that file. If it exists, then we
     # rewite the url to have explicit .html on the end
     # and then send it on its way to the next config rule.
     # if there is no file on the fs then it sets all the
     # necessary headers and proxies to our upstream mongrels
     if (-f $request_filename.html) {
       rewrite (.*) $1.html break;
     }

     if (!-f $request_filename) {
       proxy_pass http://vscrm;
       break;
     }
   }

   error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
   location = /50x.html {
     root   html;
   }
 }
}