Introduction
Nginx is one of the most popular open source web server software. It is widely used for load balancing, reverse proxying, media streaming and much more. Nginx is the only all‑in‑on high-performance HTTP server, designed to serve high volume of concurrent connections, as an alternative to Apache web server. Today Nginx is installed on more then 450 million servers world wide, and is used by one of the highest traffic website on the web like Dropbox, Zynga games, Netflix. There is no question that Nginx is the best-in-class web server and application delivery solution. In this guide we will show you how to install Nginx on Ubuntu 16.40. Installing Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04, is an easy task, just carefully follow the steps bellow and your should have Nginx installed on your Ubuntu server in less then 10 min. This guide should work on other Ubuntu based Linux VPS systems as well but was tested and written for Ubuntu 16.04 VPS. Let’s get started.
Install Nginx
Nginx is available in the Ubuntu package repositories simple. First update the apt cache with the following command:
sudo apt update
and install Nginx by issuing:
sudo apt install nginx
Once the instillation is completed Nginx will be automatically started.
You can make sure that Nginx service is running with the following command:
sudo systemctl status nginx
The output should look like bellow:
● nginx.service - A high performance web server and a reverse proxy server
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sat 2018-03-31 01:50:44 CDT; 8s ago
Main PID: 716 (nginx)
CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
├─716 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on
├─717 nginx: worker process
├─718 nginx: worker process
├─719 nginx: worker process
└─720 nginx: worker process
Open firewall ports
If you are using ufw you need to open HTTP port 80 and/or HTTPS port 433. Ufw comes with profiles based on the default ports of most common daemons and programs.
To open both Nginx ports run the following command:
sudo ufw allow 'Nginx Full'
To verify the change run:
sudo ufw status
The output should look like bellow:
Status: active To Action From -- ------ ---- Nginx Full ALLOW Anywhere Nginx Full (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
You can now open your browser, enter your server IP address into your browser address bar and you should see the default Nginx page.
Managing Nginx service
You can manage the Nginx service same as any other systemd unit.
Start the nginx service with the following command:
sudo systemctl start nginx
Stop the service with:
sudo systemctl stop nginx
Restart the service with:
sudo systemctl restart nginx
Check the status of the service with:
sudo systemctl status nginx
Enable the service on system boot with:
sudo systemctl enable nginx
Disable the service on system boot with:
sudo systemctl disable nginx
Create a new server block
The default Nginx installation will have one server block enabled with a document root set to /var/www/html.
In this guide we will create a new server block for the domain example.com and set the document root to /var/www/example.com.
First create the domain document root with the following command:
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com
and then create an index.html file with the following content:
sudo vim /var/www/example.com/index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>example.com</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>example.com server block</h1>
</body>
</html>
Next create a new server block with the following content:
sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
root /var/www/example.com;
index index.html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}
Activate the server block by creating a symbolic link :
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com.conf
Restart Nginx
Test the Nginx configuration and restart nginx:
sudo nginx -t sudo systemctl restart nginx
Now if you enter example.com into your browser address bar you should see example.com server block.