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I've seen plenty of resources in the indicate that when installing Nginx, you absolutely MUST compile from source using the --with-http_ssl_module option in order to use ssl. However, all of these resource seem to be referencing versions of Nginx of versions 0.x.x

I have also personally used ssl directive in the past on an Nginx server installed from the Nginx PPA, and the service runs without any error messages. Is this secure, or is there some facet of ssl that it is missing that I'm not understanding?

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  • If nginx responds to SSL directives (which it clearly does) it must have been built with the SSL module.
    – Richard Smith
    Nov 26, 2015 at 19:17

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The version of nginx you got from the PPA is compiled with --with-http_ssl_module.

You can see this by inspecting the output from nginx -V.

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  • After posting this I tried nginx -V and saw that. Thank you, I'll mark this as the accepted answer because it was straight to the point :)
    – weeksling
    Nov 27, 2015 at 16:17
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The --with-http_ssl_module flag is an on/off switch for SSL features in Nginx. If you build Nginx yourself and don't provide it, you'll build an Nginx which doesn't do SSL.

Because SSL is a very common requirement for Nginx, most binary packages are built with it enabled. The flag doesn't add any optional SSL extras or additional security over SSL - if it's not built using the SSL flag then SSL directives in the config will result in a syntax error and an Nginx which refuses to start.

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    I would like your answer if I could, but don't have the reputation. Thank you very much for the detailed answer! I assumed it should give an error if I used the ssl directive without ssl, but I wasn't sure.
    – weeksling
    Nov 27, 2015 at 16:18

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