How to Compile Nginx and Tengine with Health‑Check Modules for Enterprise Load Balancing

Nginx is a lightweight web server and reverse‑proxy widely used for its low memory usage, fast startup, and high concurrency.

Tengine, an Alibaba open‑source project derived from Nginx, integrates many enterprise features and is compiled from the same Nginx version.

1. Basic Knowledge

Nginx is commonly used for reverse proxy, load balancing, and as a caching server.

The community (open‑source) version is most widely used in internet companies.

Recent Nginx releases support TCP load balancing via the stream module, enabling proxy of services like MySQL.

This article compares Nginx and Tengine from a load‑balancer perspective, covering compilation, installation, and health‑check modules.

2. Compile and Install Nginx

(1) Create a non‑root user

[root@laohan-nginx-test nginx-1.17.4]# groupadd www
[root@laohan-nginx-test nginx-1.17.4]# useradd -g www www

(2) Compile Nginx

Version information:

[root@laohan-nginx-test ~]# ls -lhrt /opt/nginx-1.17.4.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1011K Sep 2423:13 /opt/nginx-1.17.4.tar.gz

Configure parameters:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/nginx \
    --user=www \
    --group=www \
    --with-http_ssl_module \
    --with-http_stub_status_module \
    --with-http_realip_module \
    --with-threads

(3) Install Nginx

[root@laohan-nginx-test nginx-1.17.4]# make && make install ; echo $?

3. Install echo‑nginx‑module

The echo‑nginx‑module can output custom information, useful for simple APIs or debugging.

(1) Module source

https://github.com/openresty/echo-nginx-module#compatibility

(2) Download and extract

wget -c https://github.com/openresty/echo-nginx-module/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip

(3) Re‑compile Nginx with the module

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/nginx --user=www --group=www \
    --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_stub_status_module \
    --with-http_realip_module --with-threads \
    --add-module=../echo-nginx-module-master/; echo $?

(4) Install

[root@laohan-nginx-test nginx-1.17.4]# make && make install ; echo $?

4. Test echo Module

(1) Add test locations to nginx.conf

location /hello {
    default_type 'text/plain';
    return 200 'hello!';
}
location /hello_echo {
    default_type 'text/plain';
    echo "hello, echo!";
}

Access URLs:

http://182.61.183.108/laohan
http://182.61.183.108/laohan_echo

Results:

hello,laohan
hello, laohan_echo

5. Install Tengine

(1) Download

wget -c http://tengine.taobao.org/download/tengine-2.3.2.tar.gz
Saving to: ‘tengine-2.3.tar.gz’

(2) Extract tar xf tengine-2.3.2.tar.gz (3) Configure

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/tengine ; echo $?

(4) Compile and install make && make install ; echo $? (5) Verify installation

/usr/local/tengine/sbin/nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /usr/local/tengine/conf/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /usr/local/tengine/conf/nginx.conf test is successful

6. Nginx Upstream Fault‑Tolerance

(1) Failure detection – Nginx marks a node as failed on connection‑refused or timeout; HTTP error codes are counted only when proxy_next_upstream is configured (404 is ignored).

(2) Failure and recovery triggers – max_fails and fail_timeout control when a node is marked down and when it is probed again.

(3) Full‑node failure handling – If all nodes are down, Nginx re‑enables them for probing; the first successful node is used, otherwise a 502 is returned.

7. Conclusion

Health‑check is a core load‑balancer feature; Tengine bundles it directly, while the open‑source Nginx can use third‑party modules such as ngx_http_upstream_check_module. Deploying these modules in production and testing thoroughly is recommended to avoid routing traffic to failed back‑ends.

tengine‑2.3.1 adds the ngx_http_upstream_check_module . It must be compiled with --add-module=./modules/ngx_http_upstream_check_module/ to enable health checks; otherwise configuration will report a syntax error.

Option

Description

interval

Interval between health‑check packets sent to the backend.

fall (fall_count)

Number of consecutive failures after which the server is considered down.

rise (rise_count)

Number of consecutive successes after which the server is considered up.

timeout

Timeout for the health‑check request.

default_down

Initial state of the server; true means it starts as down.

type

Type of health‑check packet (tcp, ssl_hello, http, mysql, ajp, port).