The Nginx package in the Debian stable repositories can be quite outdated. It is often several version behind the latest, whereas the Nginx package from the testing/unstable repositories is updated frequently with newer versions of Nginx. We can use apt-pinning to get the a newer version of Nginx (the one present in the testing/unstable repositories) and it’s dependencies (if required) will be met from the testing/unstable repositories as well.

Let us first add the testing/unstable repositories to the software sources list.

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

Add these lines at the end of the file :

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

Replace testing with unstable if you want to add the unstable repositories instead of testing.

Now we need to pin the nginx package in testing/unstable to a higher priority so that it gets selected. Actually, in Debian, nginx is a meta-package that selects the nginx-full package. So, if you want to use nginx-light or nginx-extras, use them instead of just “nginx”.

vi /etc/apt/preferences

Add these lines :

Package: nginx
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 900

As explained before, you can use nginx-light or nginx-extra instead of nginx here. You can also use unstable instead of testing.

Now, run :

apt-get update

Check whether the newer version of nginx is selected for install by running :

apt-cache policy nginx

Finally, install/upgrade nginx by running :

apt-get install nginx

or

apt-get upgrade nginx

You’ll have a relatively newer version of Nginx installed after finishing this.