What is NGINX -- Basic Introduction and Installation

Posted on : 15th Jul 2019

Introduction

NGINX is an open-source software primarily used as web-server, reverse proxy or as a caching service. It is well known for high concurrency and low memory usage. According to BuiltWith, more than 43 million websites use NGINX as their web server.

Installing NGINX

Open your terminal and hit these commands.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install nginx

sudo service nginx start

After installation, verify whether the nginx web-server is running or not :

sudo service nginx status

If the nginx web-server is not already running, check if port 80 on your machine is available and not in use by any other process, or follow the NGINX debugging guide.

Where is what in NGINX ?

With a fresh install, your default root directory for webserver is set to /var/www/html/.

Default webserver directory = /var/www/html/
NGINX executable path = /usr/sbin/nginx
Config files - the files having configuration for your websites = /etc/nginx/sites-available/
Log files - /var/log/nginx/