Ubuntu 12.04 + nginx + passenger + SPDY

SPDY is a improvment on HTTP and will soon become HTTP 2.0, most of the major browser support SPDY so if you enable it on your webserver, you will save a hundred milliseconds to your visitor (and to yourself). It cannot hurt right?

But here is the problem, Nginx do not support loadable module, which means that you have to add the SPDY option when compiling it. I personnally don’t like compiling stuff on my small VPS, and I always miss some dependencies. And last, the Nginx you get when doing apt-get install nginx on Ubuntu 12.04 has Passenger support, but not SPDY.

so the cool guys at Phusion provide us an alternative : Nginx downloadable binary with Passenger and SPDY already included. Everything is explained on this page.

The idea is to copy their binary over the apt-get provided nginx binary. And everytime apt-get wants to upgrade you nginx, copy over again.

That simple, and then you can say that your blog is “SPDY READY“!