Installation/Configuration of NGINX¶
Install NGINX on CentOS¶
NGINX probably isn’t installed on your server, so we’ll first need to get it.
We can install the latest version with yum. Firstly, create a file called /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo and add in the below:
[nginx]
name=nginx repo
baseurl=https://nginx.org/packages/centos/$releasever/$basearch/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
Manually replace $releasever with either 5 (for 5.x), 6 (for 6.x), or 7 (for 7.x)depending upon your OS version.
Now we can install NGINX:
yum install nginx
Most people will want their web server to start on boot, use chkconfig to make it so:
chkconfig nginx on
For CentOS 7, use the below:
systemctl enable nginx.service
Install NGINX on Ubuntu¶
First we need to install the repo. Run the below commands in an SSH session:
echo "deb https://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu/ replaceme nginx" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb-src https://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu/ replaceme nginx" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
sed -i "s#replaceme#$(cat /etc/os-release | grep UBUNTU_CODENAME | awk -F\= '{print $NF}')#g" /etc/apt/sources.list
Then we can install:
apt-get update
apt-get install nginx
Configure a site¶
Where in Apache you have Virtual Hosts and in IIS you have bindings, in NGINX you have server blocks. Each block typically configures a site.
All config files ending in .conf in the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory will be parsed as NGINX configuration files at the end of the main /etc/nginx.conf file.
The following content, if added to a file called /etc/nginx/conf.d/mywebsite.com.conf will start NGINX listening on your default IP address for a site called mywebsite.com serving content out of /var/www/vhosts/mywebsite.com/httpdocs/.
upstream php {
server 127.0.0.1:9000;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name mywebsite.com www.mywebsite.com;
root /var/www/vhosts/mywebsite.com/httpdocs;
index index.php index.html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include fastcgi.conf;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
fastcgi_pass php;
}
location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
expires max;
log_not_found off;
}
}
With a standard setup like this, the files will need to be owned by the NGINX user and group:
chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/vhosts/mywebsite.com
Note
If you opt for a PHP-FPM setup later, then you’ll likely need to change that user and group to whatever user you specify in your PHP-FPM configuration
You’re nearly good to go, the only thing you need now is some content. The NGINX directive index specifies which file is used as the default index file in a directory, and as you can see from that config, index.php and index.html were specified.
By that logic, if you create a file in /var/www/vhosts/mywebsite.com/httpdocs called index.html with some content, then that’s what will display on www.mywebsite.com
Note
Don’t forget to chown any website files to nginx:nginx as well
Start it all up¶
Warning
If you haven’t yet set up any php handler, then the above config won’t start. Most people will be interested in having their website serve php, so you should carry on following the PHP-FPM guide:
If you are just looking to serve static HTML, you’ll have to comment out the upstream and php sections on the above NGINX config.
Before starting or restarting NGINX, it’s always advisable to test your new config. Testing can be done with the command service nginx configtest and if all is well, it should spit out the following message:
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
To start NGINX, the following command can be used:
service nginx start
Or if it’s already running, you can restart it:
service nginx restart
Going forward¶
Most sites now need more that just basic HTML, often using PHP to generate their dynamic content and some kind of database to store information.
As mentioned above, the NGINX config in this article is more geared towards PHP-FPM.
The following documents carry on the setup for those particular elements: