How to install Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04

Nginx pronounced "engine x" is an open source software, high-performance HTTP and reverse proxy server, used to process some large-scale websites on the Internet. It can be used as a standalone web server, [load balancing] (https://cloud.tencent.com/product/clb?from=10680), content caching and reverse proxy server for HTTP and non-HTTP.

Compared with Apache, Nginx can handle a large number of concurrent connections, and each connection takes up a small amount of memory.

This article describes how to install and manage Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04.

1. Prerequisites##

Before continuing, make sure to log in as a sudo user, and you cannot run Apache or other processes on port 80 and port 443.

Two, install Nginx

Nginx is available in the default Ubuntu source repository. To install it, run the following command:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

Once the installation is complete, Nginx will be started automatically. You can run the following command to verify it:

sudo systemctl status nginx

The output is similar to the following:

● 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 Sat 2020-05-0220:25:43 UTC; 13s ago
...

Three, configure firewall##

Now that you have installed and running Nginx on your server, you need to make sure that your firewall is configured to allow traffic to pass through HTTP (80) and HTTPS (443) ports. Assuming you are using UFW, what you can do is to enable the'Nginx Full' profile, which contains these two ports:

sudo ufw allow 'Nginx Full'

To verify the status, enter:

sudo ufw status

The output will look like this:

Status: active

To                         Action      From
- - - - - - - - - - - - 22 /tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
Nginx Full                 ALLOW       Anywhere
22 /tcp(v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere(v6)
Nginx Full(v6)            ALLOW       Anywhere(v6)

Four, test installation##

To test your new Nginx installation, open http://YOUR_IP in your browser, and you should see the default Nginx loading page, like the following:

Five, Nginx configuration file structure and best practices##

All Nginx configuration files are in the /etc/nginx/ directory.
The main Nginx configuration file is /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.
Create an independent configuration file for each domain name to facilitate server maintenance. You can define as many block files as you need.
Nginx server configuration files are stored in the /etc/nginx/sites-available directory. All configuration files in the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled directory will be used by Nginx.
The best recommendation is to use a standard naming scheme. For example, if your domain name is mydomain.com, then the configuration file should be named /etc/nginx/sites-available/mydomain.com.conf
If you have reusable configuration sections in the domain name server configuration block, extract these configuration sections and make a small reusable configuration.
Nginx log files (access.log and error.log) are located in the /var/log/nginx/ directory. It is recommended to configure a different access and error for each server configuration block.
You can set the root directory of your website wherever you want. The most commonly used website root directory locations include:
/home/<user_name>/<site_name>
/var/www/<site_name>
/var/www/html/<site_name>
/opt/<site_name>

Six, summary##

We have shown you how to install Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04.

You can start deploying your application and use Nginx as a network or proxy server.