A Beginner's Guide to Nginx: Getting Started with the Popular Web Server.

Well, we have all heard about Nginx as a web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, and proxy server for email communications, and it is also known for its performance and stability. Let us start with some hands-on with Nginx and see what it can do.

How to Set Up Nginx

Let's first install nginx by running the below command

sudo apt install nginx -y

Once installed, it should be automatically up and running. You can check the status by running.

sudo systemctl status nginx

If the status is running, then we all are set. If not, then we may have to explicitly start the service by running.

sudo systemctl start nginx

Now, if everything is set, you can visit localhost, and you should see an nginx welcome page.

Getting Started with Web Server Configuration

After installing Nginx, the Linux system stores all the Nginx files in the directory /etc. So let's go to /etc/nginx and check all the files. In those files, there is one particular file which is very interesting to us, i.e. nginx.conf, which has all the instructions for various configurations.

Let's do one thing. Let's take a backup of that file and let's write our own code. For taking a backup, lets run this

sudo mv nginx.conf nginx.conf.backup

Now, lets have our configuration.

events {

}
http {
    server {
        listen 80;
        return 200 "Hello from nginx!"
    }
}

It's a simple one; we just defined an HTTP server which listens to port 80, and when accessed, it will just return Hello from nginx!

Before that, we need to tell Nginx about our new configuration and then restart Nginx. First, let's check for any syntax mistakes by running.

sudo nginx -t

If there were no errors, it should say successful at the end. Once that is done, lets now restart our nginx by running

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Note: There are various ways to reload nginx, which we will mention in further blogs.

Now, let's refresh our localhost and see the response. Vola. it shows Hello from nginx!

Conclusion

See, a simple Nginx server is relatively easy to set up. Let's learn more about nginx and its configurations in our next blog.