Setting Up NGINX - NGINX

Original: https://www.nginx.com/blog/setting-up-nginx/

Since its introduction more than a decade ago, NGINX has become the most popular web server for busy websites. More than 160 million websites use NGINX, including more than half of the top 100,000 websites.

With NGINX having reached such popularity, it makes sense to use NGINX for all your web‑serving needs, and additionally to take advantage of its capabilities as a reverse proxy server, caching server, load balancer, and more.

This blog post guides you in getting NGINX and NGINX Plus up and running on Ubuntu 16.04 on Amazon Web Services (AWS), an easy‑to‑use setup that doesn’t affect the settings on your personal computer. This blog post covers both NGINX and NGINX Plus.

Once you complete the steps given here, you may want to continue with the NGINX Core training, a full‑day course where you’ll learn how to configure, administer, and manage NGINX. The course also readies you for our other instructor‑led and self‑paced courses on advanced topics.

Accessing a Terminal

For this tutorial, you need a terminal to connect to your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance. Macs have a built‑in terminal, but Windows users need to download PuTTY or an equivalent tool. If you prefer to use your own local terminal to set up NGINX or NGINX Plus and serve web content, feel free to skip to Setting up AWS.

Accessing a Terminal on MacOS

On Macs, you can use the built‑in terminal tool to do everything in this tutorial.

  1. Click the magnifying glass icon at the right end of the top bar on the screen.
  2. Type terminal in the pop‑up box and press Enter. A separate terminal window opens.

Accessing a Terminal on Windows

Windows doesn’t come with a built‑in terminal, so you will need to download one from the internet. PuTTY is a common ssh client used ubiquitously throughout the world.

  1. Access http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html.
  2. Download and install the file in a location of your choice, then open it. You can’t access the actual terminal until you finish the steps in the next section, however.

Setting Up AWS

Set up your AWS deployment by creating an EC2 instance and connecting to it.

  1. On the AWS home page, sign in to the (AWS Management) Console or create a new account.
  2. Click  Services  in the top Console navigation bar, then EC2 in the Compute section.

    Screenshot of selecting EC2 on the service-selection page of the AWS Management Console

  3. Click the  Launch Instance  button on the page that opens.
  4. On the Step 1 page, click the  Select  button In the Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS (HVM), SSD Volume Type row.
  5. On the Step 2 page, select the t2.micro instance type, which as of this writing is marked  Free tier eligible  and selected by default.

    Screenshot of the interface for choosing an AWS EC2 instance type

  6. By default EC2 instances accept only SSH traffic. To allow incoming HTTP and HTTPS traffic:

    1. At the top of the window, click 6. Configure Security Group.

      Screenshot showing how to access the interface for configuring the security group for an AWS EC2 instance

    2. On the Step 6 page, click the  Add Rule  button below the table, then select HTTP in the Type column. We are allowing access to our instances from any IP address (the value in the Source column is Anywhere).
    3. Repeat Step b for HTTPS.
  7. Click the  Review and Launch  button at the bottom of the page.
  8. On the Step 7 page, click the  Launch  button at the bottom.
  9. In the box that pops up, create a new key pair:

    1. Select Create a new key pair from the upper drop‑down menu.
    2. Type a name in the Key pair name field, such as NGINX_key.

      Screenshot of the interface for naming the key pair for a new AWS EC2 instance as a prerequisite to configuring AWS global load balancing (GLB) with NGINX Plus

    3. Click the  Download Key Pair  button.
    4. In your file manager utility, move the downloaded .pem file to a secure location. For the tutorial we’re placing it in the /Desktop/NGINX directory.
    5. Click the  Launch Instances  button.
  10. On the Launch Status page that opens, click the  View Instances  button at the bottom.
  11. On the page that opens, the new instance appears in the table. Give it a name:

    1. Click the pencil icon in the Name column.
    2. Type the name in the field and click the check‑mark icon.

  12. Click the  Connect button at the top of the screen. A window like the following pops up.

    Screenshot of the instructions for connecting to an AWS EC2 instance

  13. Follow the directions on the pop‑up to finish connecting to your instance (including the ones accessible by clicking connect using PuTTY, if you’re using Windows). This includes pasting the sample ssh command into your terminal once you’ve navigated to your key.

Installing NGINX Software

Now that you have your AWS virtual machine (EC2 instance) set up, it’s time to install either the open source NGINX software or NGINX Plus, which is available for free in a 30‑day trial). Both options work in the context of this tutorial, but if you want to further explore the advanced features in NGINX Plus, please request a free trial.

Installing Open Source NGINX

To install the open source NGINX software, follow these steps:

  1. Access your terminal.
  2. Download the NGINX signing key:

    sudo wget http://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
  3. Add the key:

    sudo apt-key add nginx_signing.key
  4. Change directory to /etc/apt.

    cd /etc/apt
  5. Edit the sources.list file, appending this text at the end:

    deb http://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu xenial nginx
    deb-src http://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu xenial nginx
  6. Update the NGINX software:

    sudo apt-get update
  7. Install NGINX:

    sudo apt-get install nginx
  8. Type Y when prompted.

  9. Start NGINX:

    sudo service nginx start
  10. Continue to Opening Your Web Page.

Installing NGINX Plus

  1. If you don’t already have NGINX Plus, then sign up for a 30‑day free trial.
  2. When you receive notification that your subscription is available, log in at the NGINX Plus Customer Portal. Access the installation instructions by clicking either of the hyperlinks shown in the screenshot.

    NGINX Plus free trial activation page with subscription certificate and key for NGINX reverse proxy and web server

  3. When installation is complete and NGINX Plus is running, continue to Opening Your Web Page.

Opening Your Web Page

Now that we’ve started the NGINX software, we’ll look at the web page that NGINX and NGINX Plus serve by default before you configure it to deliver your site’s content. Follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Instances tab on the EC2 Dashboard if you are not there already (click Instances in the left‑hand column.)
  2. Screenshot showing newly created EC2 instances in one of two regions, which is a prerequisite to configuring AWS GSLB (global server load balancing) with NGINX Plus

  3. Select the instance’s IP address in the Public DNS Address column and copy it into the paste buffer.
  4. Open a new tab in the browser and paste the address into the address bar. This appears in the window:

    The welcome page confirms that you NGINX reverse proxy and web server is up and running

Setting Up Sample Files

Now that we know we have a working version of NGINX or NGINX Plus installed, it’s time to put it to good use! Let’s begin by setting up some files and directories.

  1. Change directory to your home directory if you are not already there. In the following instructions, it is /home/ubuntu.
  2. Create a folder called public_html and change into it.
  3. Inside the new folder, create a file called index.html and a folder called application1.
  4. In the application1 folder, create a file called app1.html with some text in it.
  5. Change back to your home directory.
  6. Create a folder called data.
  7. Within the data folder, create a folder called images.

Serving Pages and Images

Our first use case for NGINX or NGINX Plus is to serve pages and images to the user via our web page.

  1. Change directory to /etc/nginx/conf.d.
  2. Rename default.conf to default.conf.bak to prevent NGINX or NGINX Plus from using it as the default configuration file.
  3. Create a file called server1.conf with this configuration in it:

    server {
        root /home/ubuntu/public_html;
    
        location /application1 {  }
    
        location /images {		
            root /home/ubuntu/data;	
        }
    }
  4. Change directory to ~/data/images.
  5. Find an image that you want to serve and copy it to the ~/data/images directory. As an example, the following command copies in the NGINX logo:

    sudo wget https://cdn.wp.nginx.com/wp-content/themes/nginx-theme/assets/img//logo.png
  6. Reload NGINX or NGINX Plus:

    sudo nginx -s reload
  7. Open your web page and request the image at this URL:

    https://NGINX-server/images/logo.png

  8. Also access the application and observe what you get:

    https://NGINX-server/application1/app1.html

Setting Up a Proxy Server

Now that we have a working web server, it’s time to learn how to configure it to route traffic. This capability enables you to pass traffic through to other servers and is a major step towards setting up load balancing. Follow these steps:

  1. In the ~/data folder, create a folder called server2.
  2. In the server2 folder, create a folder called sampleApp.
  3. Inside the sampleApp folder, create a file named index.html and write some text in it.
  4. Change directory to /etc/nginx/conf.d.
  5. Create a file called server2.conf with this configuration in it:

    server {
            listen 8080;
            root /home/ubuntu/data/server2;
    }
  6. Modify server1.conf as follows:

    server {
        root /home/ubuntu/public_html;
    
        location /application1 {
            proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/sampleApp;
        }
    
        location /images {
            root /home/ubuntu/data;
        }
    }
  7. Reload NGINX or NGINX Plus:

    sudo nginx -s reload
  8. Access this URL in your browser and observe what has changed compared to when you accessed it in Serving Pages and Images:

    https://NGINX-server/application1/index.html

So that’s it! You now have a working Ubuntu instance running NGINX, which is ready to run as a proxy server.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to serve files and images over the Internet, as well as configure it as a reverse proxy. If you have any questions about the tutorial, we offer an NGINX Core training course that covers this material in much more depth. The course also covers some of the essentials in web‑serving and application delivery, such as load balancing, location routing, and security. You will have a chance to speak to an expert in the field about any questions you have, as well as delve deeper into the power of NGINX and NGINX Plus.

Retrieved by Nick Shadrin from nginx.com website.