Unable to find or install amazon-linux-extras

Question

I am trying to install nginx on AWS EC2 instance. As this is done using amazon-linux-extras as per AWS documentation, I tried that. But I am unable to find the package or install it using yum install(it says that the package is already available but I am unable to find it using 'which'.

Below is the terminal output. Please help.

[arjun@ip-172-31-32-27 ~]$ which amazon-linux-extras

/usr/bin/which: no amazon-linux-extras in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/home/arjun/.local/bin:/home/arjun/bin)

[arjun@ip-172-31-32-27 ~]$ sudo yum -y install amazon-linux-extras

[sudo] password for arjun:

Loaded plugins: extras_suggestions, langpacks, priorities, update-motd
amzn2-core                                                                                                                                                               | 2.4 kB  00:00:00

Package amazon-linux-extras-1.6.9-1.amzn2.noarch already installed and latest version

Nothing to do

Answer 1

All you need to do is:

amazon-linux-extras enable nginx

EDIT: This answer was valid in 2019. It looks like extras was removed as of Dec 2022.

Answer 2

So Nginx is preinstalled in Amazon Linux 2022, so really, you should upgrade the distribution you are using (Amazon Linux 2).

Generally, if you need to install on Amazon Linux 2 you should build from source. The code below is generally the method today, but it is typical to add/want extra modules which may modify the flags for ./auto/configure, for example. More information on how to build Nginx's repo into its executable can be found on its online documentation http://nginx.org/en/docs/configure.html.

git clone --quiet https://github.com/nginx/nginx.git

cd nginx || exit

./auto/configure --with-http_ssl_module --user=www-data --group=www-data

make

make install

nginx -t