How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04

How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04

NGINX UBUNTU UBUNTU 16.04
Introduction

Nginx is one of the most popular web servers in the world and is responsible for hosting some of the largest and highest-traffic sites on the internet. It is more resource-friendly than Apache in most cases and can be used as a web server or a reverse proxy.

In this guide, we'll discuss how to get Nginx installed on your Ubuntu 16.04 server.

Prerequisites
Before you begin this guide, you should have a regular, non-root user with sudo privileges configured on your server. You can learn how to configure a regular user account by following our initial server setup guide for Ubuntu 16.04.

When you have an account available, log in as your non-root user to begin.

Step 1: Install Nginx
Nginx is available in Ubuntu's default repositories, so the installation is rather straight forward.

Since this is our first interaction with the apt packaging system in this session, we will update our local package index so that we have access to the most recent package listings. Afterwards, we can install nginx:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx
After accepting the procedure, apt-get will install Nginx and any required dependencies to your server.

Step 2: Adjust the Firewall
Before we can test Nginx, we need to reconfigure our firewall software to allow access to the service. Nginx registers itself as a service with ufw, our firewall, upon installation. This makes it rather easy to allow Nginx access.

We can list the applications configurations that ufw knows how to work with by typing:

sudo ufw app list
You should get a listing of the application profiles:

Output
Available applications:
  Nginx Full
  Nginx HTTP
  Nginx HTTPS
  OpenSSH
As you can see, there are three profiles available for Nginx:

Nginx Full: This profile opens both port 80 (normal, unencrypted web traffic) and port 443 (TLS/SSL encrypted traffic)
Nginx HTTP: This profile opens only port 80 (normal, unencrypted web traffic)
Nginx HTTPS: This profile opens only port 443 (TLS/SSL encrypted traffic)
It is recommended that you enable the most restrictive profile that will still allow the traffic you've configured. Since we haven't configured SSL for our server yet, in this guide, we will only need to allow traffic on port 80.

You can enable this by typing:

sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'
You can verify the change by typing:

sudo ufw status
You should see HTTP traffic allowed in the displayed output:

Output
Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
OpenSSH                    ALLOW       Anywhere                  
Nginx HTTP                 ALLOW       Anywhere                  
OpenSSH (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
Nginx HTTP (v6)            ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
Step 3: Check your Web Server
At the end of the installation process, Ubuntu 16.04 starts Nginx. The web server should already be up and running.

We can check with the systemd init system to make sure the service is running by typing:

systemctl status nginx
Output
● 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 Mon 2016-04-18 16:14:00 EDT; 4min 2s ago
 Main PID: 12857 (nginx)
   CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
           ├─12857 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on
           └─12858 nginx: worker process
As you can see above, the service appears to have started successfully. However, the best way to test this is to actually request a page from Nginx.

You can access the default Nginx landing page to confirm that the software is running properly. You can access this through your server's domain name or IP address.