Yes, I finally made the switch from Apache to Nginx. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. Not that my sites has that many hits/traffic, but just because I wanted to try Nginx out.
It was a pretty straightforward experience to set it up. Now since my old VPS was running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS I figured it was time to upgrade it too, that’s why I went and created a new VPS. So … all I did was basically to:
- create a new VPS
- install Ubunbu 10.04 on it
- install Nginx
- and PHP
- and MySQL
- copy my old www-folder (I used rsync for this, so I quickly could update it just before I went live)
- import my old mysql-databases (using mysqldump, storing dump in www-folder, and letting rsync pick up it’s changes too)
- setup server blocks for Nginx and convert the rewrite rules from apache to the format nginx uses. This was far more simple than I expected. Perhaps I cheated a bit by using http://www.anilcetin.com/convert-apache-htaccess-to-nginx/.
- remove ip-number from old VPS and attach it to the new VPS
Most surprising/cool was the last part when I switched VPS for the IP number. It took just 30 seconds or so to do the switch from one server to another. Pretty cool. No waiting for DNS or similar.