How do I install Nginx, PHP, and MySQL from the source code?

Here are two reasons why you are probably better off not compiling the lastest source code from scratch yourself: Because you get more eyeballs on the source code code you use. This improves securitys. Having the latest is not always the greatest. If you wait some time before upgrading you are less likely to run into new bugs. These can be feature bugs, security bugs or whatnot. Because it's too much work and not enough bang for the buck (see, below). Especially if you are a small business where working on new features probably should be a higher priority task. That said, there are cases when you'd like to compile stuff yourself. Here are some cases that I can come up with off the top of my head: You have extreme security requirements. I'm thinking of somethings like banks and other high target businesses. You need to need to add a compile-time flag to enable some feature. You need to include a compile-time module into an application/library. When you quickly need to recompile an application to work around a critical bug. For open-source applications and library I generally don't recommend applying a lot of patches yourself. You risk branching off too much, and you risk building stuff that's not intended for the application. You could even break in unintended ways if you don't know what you are doing. Instead, I suggest getting patches merged upstream. If you really need to recompile, I suggest you download a source package for your distribution (if this is Linux we are talking about) and make modifications to it. But, like I said, most of the time it's just too much work according to me.