How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04 [Quickstart]
Table of Contents
Introduction #
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 reverse proxy.
In this guide, we’ll explain how to install Nginx on your Ubuntu 18.04 server. For a more detailed version of this tutorial, please refer to How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04.
Prerequisites #
Before you begin this guide, you should have the following:
An Ubuntu 18.04 server and a regular, non-root user with sudo privileges. Additionally, you will need to enable a basic firewall to block non-essential ports. You can learn how to configure a regular user account and set up a firewall by following our initial server setup guide for Ubuntu 18.04.
When you have an account available, log in as your non-root user to begin.
Step 1 – Installing Nginx #
Because Nginx is available in Ubuntu’s default repositories, you can install it using the apt packaging system.
Update your local package index:
sudo apt update
Install Nginx:
sudo apt install nginx
Step 2 – Adjusting the Firewall #
If you followed the prerequisite server setup tutorial, then you have the UFW firewall enabled. Check the available ufw application profiles with the following command:
sudo ufw app list
Available applications:
Nginx Full
Nginx HTTP
Nginx HTTPS
OpenSSH
Let’s enable the most restrictive profile that will still allow the traffic you’ve configured, permitting traffic on port 80:
sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'
Verify the change:
sudo ufw status
Status: active
To Action From
-- ------ ----
OpenSSH ALLOW Anywhere
Nginx HTTP ALLOW Anywhere
OpenSSH (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
Nginx HTTP (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
Step 3 – Checking your Web Server #
Check with the systemd init system to make sure the service is running by typing:
systemctl status nginx
● 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 Fri 2018-04-20 16:08:19 UTC; 3 days ago
Docs: man:nginx(8)
Main PID: 2369 (nginx)
Tasks: 2 (limit: 1153)
CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
├─2369 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on;
└─2380 nginx: worker process
Access the default Nginx landing page to confirm that the software is running properly through your IP address:
http://your_server_ip
You should see the default Nginx landing page:
Step 4 – Setting Up Server Blocks (Recommended) #
When using the Nginx web server, you can use server blocks (similar to virtual hosts in Apache) to encapsulate configuration details and host more than one domain from a single server. We will set up a domain called example.com, but you should replace this with your own domain name. To learn more about setting up a domain name with DigitalOcean, see our introduction to DigitalOcean DNS.
Create the directory for example.com, using the -p flag to create any necessary parent directories:
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/html
Assign ownership of the directory:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.com/html
The permissions of your web roots should be correct if you haven’t modified your umask value, but you can make sure by typing:
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/example.com
Create a sample index.html page using nano or your favorite editor:
nano /var/www/example.com/html/index.html
Inside, add the following sample HTML:
/var/www/example.com/html/index.html
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to Example.com!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Success! The example.com server block is working!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Save and close the file when you are finished.
Make a new server block at /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
Paste in the following configuration block, updated for our new directory and domain name:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /var/www/example.com/html;
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}
Save and close the file when you are finished.
Enable the file by creating a link from it to the sites-enabled directory:
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
Two server blocks are now enabled and configured to respond to requests based on their listen and server_name directives:
example.com: Will respond to requests for example.com and www.example.com.
default: Will respond to any requests on port 80 that do not match the other two blocks.
To avoid a possible hash bucket memory problem that can arise from adding additional server names, it is necessary to adjust a single value in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file. Open the file:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Find the server_names_hash_bucket_size directive and remove the # symbol to uncomment the line:
/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
...
http {
...
server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
...
}
...
Test for syntax errors:
sudo nginx -t
Restart Nginx to enable your changes:
sudo systemctl restart nginx
Nginx should now be serving your domain name. You can test this by navigating to http://example.com, where you should see something like this:
Conclusion #
Now that you have your web server installed, you have many options for the type of content to serve and the technologies you want to use to create a richer experience.
If you’d like to build out a more complete application stack, check out this article on how to configure a LEMP stack on Ubuntu 18.04.