Ubuntu Server 20.04

How to install and set up Nginx as a web server on Ubuntu Server 20.04

Installing Nginx

Follow these steps to install Nginx:

Step 1 : Update the apt package repository and install Nginx.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

Step 2 : Check if Nginx is properly installed and running

sudo service nginx status

Step 3 : Check the installed version of Nginx

nginx -v

Step 4 : Open a browser on a local machine and point it to the server IP address.

Configuring Nginx Server Block (Virtual host)

Step 5 : Change the directory to /var/www and create a directory structure for the required domains and sub-domain. Also create a blank index.html for each domain

cd /var/www
sudo mkdir -p example.com/html
sudo touch example.com/html/index.html

Step 6 : Change the directory ownership and file permissions on the newly created directories

sudo chown -R $USER:www-data example.com
sudo chmod 755 -R example.com

Step 7 : Edit the index.html

nano example.com/html/index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <title>Welcome</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Welcome</h1>
    </body>
</html>

Step 8 : Next, we need to create virtual host configuration for each domain. Change the directory to /etc/nginx/sites-available and copy the default virtual host file default

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
sudo cp default example.com

Step 9 : Edit the new virtual host file

sudo nano example.com
server {
	listen 80;
	listen [::]:80;

	root /var/www/example.com/html;

	# Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
	index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

	server_name example.com www.example.com;

	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
	}
}

Step 10 : Let’s 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/

Step 11 : To test the Nginx configuration, run the following command

sudo nginx -t

Step 12 : Restart Nginx to enable your changes

sudo service nginx restart

Step 13 : Finally, try to access domains by their names. You should see text entered in the respective index.html files for each domain: