How To Install Nginx on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx on CentOS 7. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx is a powerful web server software that can be used on your server. It is also known for its high performance and low memory usage which will allow fewer resources to be used while getting the job done efficiently. A popular setup is to use it as a proxy for Apache, which can then serve application requests. That will not be covered in this tutorial, though.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Nginx on a CentOS 7.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Nginx on CentOS 7

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo yum -y update

Step 2. Installing and Configuring NGINX in CentOS 7.

Nginx is not yet available in CentOS 7 official repositories, so we have to add/install Nginx yum repository by issuing the command below:

rpm -Uvh http://nginx.org/packages/centos/7/noarch/RPMS/nginx-release-centos-7-0.el7.ngx.noarch.rpm
yum install nginx

Start Nginx and add it to automatically start on your system start-up using:

sudo systemctl restart nginx
sudo systemctl enable nginx

You can verify that Nginx is really running by opening your favorite web browser and entering the URL http://your-server's-ipaddress, if it is installed, then you will see this:

Step 3 Configure the Nginx web server.

Let’s say you have the domain mydomain.com and you like to use it to host a PHP-based web application in /var/www/mydomain.com like WordPress, and Joomla. To set up Nginx serve requests for mydomain.com, and serve the PHP scripts in /var/www/mydomain.com you would have to create a server block in /etc/nginx/conf.d/mydomain.com.conf which would look something like this:

### nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/mydomain.com.conf

server {
    server_name mydomain.com;
    listen 80;
    root /var/www/mydomain.com;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/mydomain.com-access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/mydomain.com-error.log;
    index index.php;

    location / {
        try_files  $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }

    location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html)$ {
        access_log off;
        expires max;
    }
    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny  all;
    }
    location ~ \.php {
        try_files $uri = 404;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

Test and re-start Nginx using:

nginx -t
systemctl restart nginx

Step 4. Configure IPTables or firewalls.

CentOS 7 has a local firewall enabled by default. Proper TCP ports may need to be opened to allow external requests. This will usually be port 80 for normal HTTP traffic:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=80/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Nginx. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Nginx web server in CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nginx website.