Requirements

You have installed Apache on your server. Apache is already running a site on port 80.

Change Apache listening port

Edit /etc/apache2/ports.conf to make Apache listening to port 8080 instead of default port 80.

Find following line:

NameVirtualHost *:80
Listen 80

Change it to:

NameVirtualHost *:8080
Listen 8080

Do not forget to your existing vhost listening port in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/*

Change:

<VirtualHost *:80>

To:

<VirtualHost *:8080>

Disable Unuse modules in Apache

Since HTTP requests is now handled by Nginx, we can disable KeepAlive in Apache. Edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and change:

KeepAlive Off

Also, run following commands to disable unused modules.

a2dismod deflate
a2dismod cgi
a2dismod autoindex
a2dismod negotiation
a2dismod ssl

Install forward module

Install mod_rpaf in Apache to forward visitor IP to Apache. Otherwise, your scripts will read REMOTE_ADDR values as server IP.

apt-get install libapache2-mod-rpaf

Stop Apache service

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Setup Nginx

Install Nginx.

apt-get install nginx

Remove default vhost to prevent conflicts.

rm -rf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*

Create a new default vhost:

cat >/etc/nginx/sites-available/000-default <<EOF
server {
    access_log off;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
    }
}
EOF

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/000-default /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/000-default

Create vhost for existing website to forward request to Apache:

cat >/etc/nginx/sites-available/domain.com <<EOF
server {
    server_name www.domain.com domain.com;
    root /var/www/domain.com/;

    access_log off;

    # Static contents
    location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {
        expires max;
    }

    # Dynamic content, forward to Apache
    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
    }
}
EOF

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/domain.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/domain.com

Restart Nginx and it’s done.

/etc/init.d/nginx restart