nginx dependency problem trying to upgrade

Question

Trying to upgrade my Ubuntu 12.04 vps I get the following error:

henrik@neung:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade
[sudo] password for henrik: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 nginx-full : Depends: nginx-common (= 1.2.4-1ubuntu0ppa2~precise) but 1.2.4-2ubuntu0ppa1~precise is installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

So I try to run this:

henrik@neung:~$ sudo apt-get -f install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  nginx-full
The following packages will be upgraded:
  nginx-full
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 42 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/441 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of nginx-full:
 nginx-full depends on nginx-common (= 1.2.4-1ubuntu0ppa2~precise); however:
  Version of nginx-common on system is 1.2.4-2ubuntu0ppa1~precise.
dpkg: error processing nginx-full (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of nginx:
 nginx depends on nginx-full | nginx-light; however:
  Package nginx-full is not configured yet.
  Package nginx-light is not installed.
dpkg: error processing nginx (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
                          No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
                                                    Errors were encountered while processing:
 nginx-full
 nginx
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Can anybody help fix this?

Answer 1

The problem is that nginx-full depends on nginx-common, this means that you can't install the package nginx-full without have a specific version of nginx-common.

Here is an question dedicated to this problem, but the resolution is very extensive, reaching to, not only one, but different cases. So I will show you a short but effective method.

Actually, I don't know how to install that version of nginx-common, but I know that you will solve your problem by reinstalling all the package. To do that you must enter the following command in a terminal.

sudo apt-get remove nginx* && sudo apt-get install nginx-full

Answer 2

I had the same problem. I DO NOT have Apache, and nothing else was blocking my port 80. I could NOT install nginx with

sudo apt-get install nginx

nor with

sudo apt-get install nginx-common nginx-full

After one week I stumbled over this little blog: https://etc.banana.fish/?p=75

In this blog, the solution is:

1. Install nginx-common: sudo apt-get install nginx-common
2. Remove listen [::]:80 default_server; from /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default (I made this using the root-user)
3. Just to be sure, I did reboot my server.
4. Just to be sure twice, I did sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get upgrade.
5. Now I finally called sudo apt-get install nginx-full and it worked!

Afterwords I could see the Titlescreen of nginx, when I typed in the IP of my remote server!

Answer 3

I have a strong feeling that you forgot to run sudo apt-get update prior to running sudo apt-get upgrade - the package manager uses old information about nginx-common package version while nginx-full requires a newer version.