Nginx

Nginx#

For Ubuntu 18.04+

Installation#

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

Start the service

sudo service nginx start
sudo service nginx status

If the firewall is set up, you can access the server at localhost, your public IP address, or your domain name if your router has forwarded port 80.

Firewall#

Nginx provides the following applications to the firewall,

Nginx Full
Nginx HTTP
Nginx HTTPS

Allow the Nginx application you use through the firewall:

sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'

Virtual Host / Server Block#

The equivalent of virtual host on Nginx is called server blocks. There already exists one by default at /var/www/html. To support multiple domains you need to have multiple server blocks. Regardless, it’s highly recommended to create another one for each web application (i.e., leave /var/www/html when you want to manually write and serve HTML which is rare).

Replace example.com with your own domain name (without www).

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/html/
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.com/html/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/example.com/

For testing, you may add index.html to /var/www/example.com/html/. Here is a boilerplate:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Hello, World!</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Success! Hello, World!</h1>
    </body>
</html>

This particular web page will not be accessible until we register the server block in configurations on the next section.

Configuration#

Server block configuration are located at /etc/nginx/sites-available/ and enabled at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/. We will first add the server block configuration to /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

# /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;
        }
}

Then register by symbolic link:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

On Nginx configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, uncomment the hash bucket size

...
http {
    ...
    server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
    ...
}
...

Check for syntax error:

sudo nginx -t

Fix any error and restart Nginx server:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Nginx Configurations#

Gunicorn#

For a gunicorn hosted project with the project folder at /path/to/project, the application program is app.py with WSGI also named app.

gunicorn -b 0.0.0.0:8000 app:app

the Nginx configuration should look something like this:

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name example.com www.example.com;

	# Root of project to access static
	root /path/to/project;

	# Optional, ignore favicon error
	# location = /favicon.ico {access_log off; log_not_found off;}


	location / {
		proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:8000 ;
	}
}
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