NGINX Quickstart

In my opinion Nginx is the most useful and configurable server engine. It feels very light but you can make it work like different server components - web server, proxy, load balancer etc. This is a quick start to setup Nginx in a linux machine.

Install

Just run:

sudo apt-get install nginx

And verify:

sudo nginx -v

Basic stuff

Starting:

sudo service nginx start

Restarting:

sudo service nginx reload

Checking status:

sudo service nginx status

Configuration

After installation you can find the server configuration in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.

A few important keys are:

worker_processes - No of Nginx workers. Usually this will be set as no of cores of CPU available.

worker_connections - No of connections a single worker should handle at a time.

server - Configuration for one host and port. It has following sub keys:

• listen - port number
• server_name - list of hostnames to listen to
• root - root folder of the content
• index - list of index files
• location - configuration for handling a specific path in the server

upstream - details about the remote servers Nginx might proxy to

Static file server

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.ajinasokan.com ajinasokan.com
    root /var/www/html/ajinasokan.com;
    index index.html

    location / {
        alias /var/www/html/ajinasokan.com;
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

Proxy

upstream myremoteserver {
    server 10.10.20.130
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.ajinasokan.com ajinasokan.com
    root /var/www/html/ajinasokan.com;
    index index.html

    location / {
        proxy_set_header   Host             $host:$server_port;
        proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_pass http://myremoteserver/;
    }
}

Load balancing

upstream myremoteserver {
    server 10.10.20.130
    server 10.10.20.131
    server 10.10.20.132
    server 10.10.20.133
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.ajinasokan.com ajinasokan.com
    root /var/www/html/ajinasokan.com;
    index index.html

    location / {
        proxy_set_header   Host             $host:$server_port;
        proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_pass http://myremoteserver/;
    }
}

Troubleshooting

Nginx error logs can be found in: /var/log/nginx/nginx_error.log

And access logs can be found in: /var/log/nginx/nginx_access.log

If you are on Mac then logs are in: /usr/local/var/log/nginx