Steps to Setup Nginx In A Domain Medium

Introduction To Nginx

Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a lightweight, open source web server that was originally designed as a proxy server for HTTP. It is known for its speed and scalability. Nginx is often used as a web hosting solution for small to medium sized websites and applications.

The great thing about Nginx is that it is highly configurable. It can be used to serve static content, as a reverse proxy, or even as a load balancer. Because of its scalability, it is often chosen by developers who are looking for a cost-effective and reliable web hosting solution.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up Nginx in a Domain medium, and how to configure Nginx for optimal performance.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you need to have an active Domain Name and associated hosting account, and you should have a basic understanding of how to use the command line on your server.

In this tutorial, we will be using Ubuntu 16.04, but the steps should be similar if you are using a different operating system.

Step 1: Login To Your Server

The first step is to login to your server using SSH. To do this, you will need the IP address of your server, as well as a username and password.

Once you have logged in, you can begin the process of setting up Nginx. We will begin by installing the necessary packages.

Step 2: Install Nginx Packages

To install the Nginx packages, we need to run the following command:

sudo apt-get install nginx

This will begin the installation process, which should take a few minutes to complete. When it is finished, you should see something similar to this:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-44-generic linux-image-3.13.0-44-generic
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
libxslt1.1 nginx-common nginx-light ssl-cert
Suggested packages:
libgd2-xpm-dev libgeoip-dev libxslt1-dev geoip-database
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libxslt1.1 nginx nginx-common nginx-light ssl-cert
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.

Step 3: Configure the Nginx Server

Now that Nginx has been installed, we can begin to configure it. We need to edit the main Nginx configuration file in order to do this.

Using your favourite text editor, open the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file. You should see something similar to this:

user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events {
worker_connections 768;
# multi_accept on;
}

http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 65;

# Gzip Settings
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_min_length 10240;
gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth;
gzip_types text/plain text/css text/xml application/x-javascript application/xml application/atom+xml;

# Logging Settings
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

# Virtual Host Configuration
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf;
}

The snippet above is a sample of a typical Nginx configuration file. We can modify this file to configure our server for the Domain we are working with.

Step 4: Setup Your Domain

The first thing we need to do is to setup our Domain name in the Nginx configuration file. To do this, we need to open the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default file and add the following lines:

server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;

root /var/www/html;
index index.html;
}

In this example, we are using the “example.com” Domain name. You should replace this with the Domain name that you have registered. You should also enter the correct file paths for the “root” and “index” directives.

Once you have made these changes, save the file and then create a symbolic link. To do this, we need to run the following command:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

This will create a symbolic link from the sites-available directory to the sites-enabled directory. We now need to restart Nginx in order for our changes to take effect.

Step 5: Restart Nginx

Once you have made the changes to the Nginx configuration file, you need to restart the Nginx service in order for the changes to take effect. To do this, run the following command:

sudo service nginx restart

Once the Nginx service has been restarted, you should now be able to access your Domain in a web browser, and you should see the default Nginx welcome page.

Step 6: Test Nginx Performance

Now that you have Nginx configured, you can begin to test its performance. There are a variety of tools that you can use to do this, but the most common is the Apache Benchmark tool.

You can run this tool by running the following command:

ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://example.com/

This command will run 1000 requests against your server, with 10 concurrent requests. Once the command has finished, you should see the results, which will include the number of requests per second and the average response time.

Conclusion

Nginx is a powerful and flexible web server that can be used for a variety of hosting needs. In this tutorial, we showed you how to set up Nginx in a Domain medium, and how to configure Nginx for optimal performance. We also showed you how to test Nginx performance with the Apache Benchmark tool.

FAQs

Q. What is Nginx?

A. Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a lightweight, open source web server that was originally designed as a proxy server for HTTP. It is known for its speed and scalability.

Q. What are the prerequisites for setting up Nginx?

A. The prerequisites for setting up Nginx are an active Domain Name and associated hosting account, and a basic understanding of how to use the command line on your server.

Q. How do I configure Nginx?

A. You can configure Nginx by editing the main Nginx configuration file. This is located in the /etc/nginx/nginx