Guide on switching from distro-provided nginx to nginx built from source?

[George]

Maybe this will help
http://www.howtoforge.com/using-ngx_pagespeed-with-nginx-on-debian-wheezy
and
http://www.howtoforge.com/using-ngx_pagespeed-with-nginx-on-debian-jessie-testing
- right up your alley for Debian distro :)

I personally use CentOS build via Centmin Mod Nginx as it already includes
ngx_pagespeed support out of the box
http://centminmod.com/nginx_ngx_pagespeed.html :)

As to minimal downtime and risk, easiest would be to do a test run first,
DigitalOcean VPS charged on an hourly basis is a good platform to do testing
for end users wanting to make the jump from pre-packaged Nginx builds to
source compilation. I suppose you could even automate the entire transition
and shell script something to do all the leg work.

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,248335,248342#msg-248342