Sample of Chef recipe to install nginx.

_run chef-solo

sudo chef-solo -c solo.rb -j ./product.json

default.rb

%w{g++ libpcre3 libpcre3-dev}.each do |pkg|
  package pkg do
    action :install
  end
end

remote_file "http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.2.8.tar.gz" do
  source  "http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.2.8.tar.gz"
  path "/tmp/nginx-1.2.8.tar.gz"
  backup false
end

bash "compile_nginx_source" do
  cwd ::File.dirname("/tmp/nginx-1.2.8.tar.gz")
  code <<-EOH
    tar zxf #{::File.basename("/tmp/nginx-1.2.8.tar.gz")} &&
    cd nginx-1.2.8 &&
    ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/nginx-chef &&
    make && make install
  EOH

  #notifies :restart, "service[nginx]"
end

template "nginx.conf" do
  path "/usr/local/nginx-chef/conf/nginx.conf"
  source "nginx.conf.erb"
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode 0644
end

nginx.conf.erb

#user  nobody;
worker_processes  <%= node['nginx']['worker_processes'] %>;

#pid        logs/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;
}


http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  'remote:$remote_addr\t'
                      'time:$time_local\t'
                      'request:$request\t'
                      'status:$status\t'
                      'referer:$http_referer\t'
                      'ua:$http_user_agent';

    access_log  logs/access.log  main;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  <%= node['nginx']['server_name'] %>;

        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }


        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }

    }

}

product.json

{
  "run_list" : [
    "recipe[hello]",
    "recipe[nginx]"
  ],
  "nginx" : {
    "worker_processes" : 2,
    "server_name" : "prod"
  }
}

stage.json

{
  "run_list" : [
    "recipe[hello]",
    "recipe[nginx]"
  ],
  "nginx" : {
    "worker_processes" : 1,
    "server_name" : "stage"
  }
}