Perfect Server Ubuntu 18.04 Nginx

1. Introduction

Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions. It is popular due to its user friendliness and availability of excellent free software packages. It is also one of the most stable and secure Linux distributions available. In this tutorial, we will be setting up a complete web server on an Ubuntu 18.04 server. We will be using Nginx web server to support our server applications. Nginx is a fast and reliable web server which is becoming increasingly popular due to its scalability and efficiency.

In this guide, you will learn how to install and configure a complete web server environment on an Ubuntu 18.04 server. We will also show you how to secure the server and enable a firewall. Finally, we will explain how to optimize Nginx to give your web server optimal performance.

2. Prerequisites

Before you can set up an Ubuntu 18.04 server with Nginx, you need to make sure that your server is configured properly. You will need to have root access to the server. You will also need to install some packages in order to set up the server correctly. Here are the packages that you will need in order to set up the server:

• Nginx web server
• MySQL database server
• PHP scripting language
• DNS server
• Firewall

The first step is to make sure that your Ubuntu 18.04 server is up to date. You can do this by running the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get update

Once the packages have been updated, you can proceed to the next step.

3. Installing Nginx

Once you have installed the required packages, you can proceed to install Nginx web server. To install Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04, you can use the following command:

sudo apt-get install nginx

Nginx is now installed. You can check the status of the web server by running the following command:

sudo systemctl status nginx

If the web server is running, you should see an output similar to this:

Active: active (running)

Once Nginx is installed and running, you can proceed to the next step.

4. Configuring Nginx

Nginx is now installed, but we need to configure it properly in order for it to work as expected. The first step is to create a server block for your web server. Server blocks allow us to configure multiple websites on a single server. To create a server block, you will need to create a Nginx configuration file. To do this, you can use the following command:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

This will create a new configuration file for your website. You can add the following code to the file to set up the basic configuration:

server {

    listen 80;

    server_name example.com;

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

    index index.html;

}

This will set up a basic configuration for your website. You can now enable the server block by creating a symbolic link to the configuration file.

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

This will create a symbolic link between the configuration file in the /etc/nginx/sites-available directory and the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled directory. You can now test the configuration by running the following command:

sudo nginx -t

If there are no errors, you can restart Nginx by running the following command:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Nginx is now configured and ready to serve web pages.

5. Securing the Server

Now that Nginx is configured and running, it is time to secure the server. The first thing that you should do is to install a firewall on the server. UFW is a firewall that is installed by default in Ubuntu. To enable the firewall, you can use the following command:

sudo ufw enable

This will enable the firewall and block all incoming connections that are not allowed. You can add rules to allow specific ports or protocols by using the following commands:

sudo ufw allow ssh

sudo ufw allow http

sudo ufw allow https

These commands will allow SSH, HTTP and HTTPS connections to your server. You can also deny connections using the “deny” command.

sudo ufw deny ftp

You can also restrict access to certain services or IP addresses by using the “limit” command.

sudo ufw limit 22

This will limit access to port 22 to only certain IP addresses. You should also configure your server to use strong passwords and not allow root access via SSH. You should also configure SSH to use a secure protocol such as SSH2. You can also install fail2ban to protect your server from brute force attacks.

6. Optimizing Nginx

The last step is to optimize Nginx for optimal performance. Nginx has many options that can be configured to improve performance. We will show you how to configure some of the most important settings. The first setting is the keepalive timeout. This setting determines how long the connection should remain open. To edit this setting, you can open the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file in a text editor and add the following line:

keepalive_timeout 20; 

This will set the keepalive timeout to 20 seconds. The next setting is the worker_processes setting. This setting determines how many processes Nginx should spawn when serving requests. To edit this setting, add the following line to your Nginx configuration file:

worker_processes 4; 

This will set the number of worker processes to 4. The next setting is the server_tokens setting. This setting determines if the server version number should be displayed in the response header. To disable this, add the following line to your Nginx configuration file:

server_tokens off; 

This will disable the server version number from being displayed in the response header.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have shown you how to configure a perfect Ubuntu 18.04 server with Nginx for optimal performance. We have also shown you how to secure the server and enable a firewall. Finally, we have explained how to optimize Nginx for optimal performance.

Thank you for reading this article. Please read other articles to learn more about setting up a web server.