How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx on Ubuntu. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx is one of the most popular web servers in the world and is responsible for hosting some of the largest and highest-traffic sites on the internet. It is more resource-friendly than Apache in most cases and can be used as a web server or a reverse proxy. So today I’m going to show you how to set up the Nginx web server on Ubuntu or Debian. It’s really not that difficult. Let’s start with Nginx.

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 the Nginx web server on a Ubuntu server. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo useror 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 Ubuntu

Step 1. To install, first, you must update apt the repository and packages by typing the below command:

sudo apt install nginx -y

Step 2. Install Nginx,

Installing Nginx is as simple as running just one command:

sudo apt-get install nginx

Starting and stopping the Nginx server

To start the Nginx server, issue the following command:

sudo systemctl start nginx

To stop the Nginx server, issue the following command:

sudo systemctl stop nginx

Configuration Nginx files/folders

• The main configuration file for Nginx is /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
• Virtual hosts are defined in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
• PHP will be configured in /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

Before you close that terminal window, it’s necessary to set the Nginx service to start at boot. Just issue the following command:

update-rc.d nginx defaults

This should already be enabled by default, so you may see a message like this:

System start/stop links for /etc/init.d/nginx already exist

Navigating to your Server’s IP address (assuming you have no other server listening on port 80), you will be greeted with the standard welcome page:

Step 3. Configure Firewall.

Now add firewall rules to allow connections as well as HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443) traffic:

sudoufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'

The steps above should produce a running Nginx which serves the Nginx default pages on port 80. We’ll start working through various configurations and optimizations to round out the series. Enjoy your new webserver! For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nginx website.