I am not familiar with debian's deb package build system, so I go through the process of building deb package from source at first. Install packages needed for building nginx sudo apt-get build-dep nginx sudo apt-get install fakeroot Get source code package: mkdir $HOME/build/nginx -p cd $HOME/build/nginx apt-get source nginx Build it to generate deb package cd nginx-0.6.32 dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot Everything goes well, a deb package is generated under $HOME/build/nginx. Then I continue to build nginx with wsgi support Checkout latest code of ( mod_wsgi for nginx) cd $HOME/build/nginx hg clone http://hg.