Nginx
Nginx (engine x) is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server
Installation
Nginx package is available in the Alpine Linux repositories. To install it run:
apk update apk add nginx
Creating new user and group 'www' for nginx
adduser -D -g 'www' www
Create a directory for html files
mkdir /www chown -R www:www /var/lib/nginx chown -R www:www /www
Configuration
You may want to make backup of original nginx.conf file before writting your own
mv /etc/nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.orig
Configuring Nginx to listen to port 80 and process .html or .htm files
vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
user www;
worker_processes 1;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
sendfile on;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
keepalive_timeout 3000;
server {
listen 80;
root /www;
index index.html index.htm;
server_name localhost;
client_max_body_size 32m;
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /var/lib/nginx/html;
}
}
}
Sample page
vi /www/index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>HTML5</title>
</head>
<body>
Server is online
</body>
</html>
Controlling nginx
Test configuration
When you've made any changes to your nginx configuration files, you should check it for errors before starting/restarting/reloading nginx.
This will check for any duplicate configuration, syntax errors etc. To do this, run:
nginx -t
You will get a feedback if it failed or not. If everything is fine, you'll see the following and can then move ahead to start the nginx server.
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
Start Nginx
After the installation Nginx is not running. To start Nginx, use start.
rc-service nginx start
You will get a feedback about the status.
* /run/nginx: creating directory * /run/nginx: correcting owner [ ok ] * Starting nginx ... [ ok ]
Reload and Restart Nginx
Changes made in the configuration file will not be applied until the command to reload configuration is sent to nginx or it is restarted.
Reloading will do a "hot reload" of the configuration without server downtime. It will start the new worker processes with a new configuration and gracefully shutdown the old worker processes. If you have pending requests, then these will be handled by the old worker processes before it dies, so it's an extremely graceful way to reload configs.
If you want to reload the web server, use reload.
rc-service nginx reload
If you want to restart the web server, use restart.
rc-service nginx restart
Stop Nginx
If you want to stop the web server, use stop.
rc-service nginx stop
Runlevel
Normally you want to start the web server when the system is launching. This is done by adding Nginx to the needed runlevel.
rc-update add nginx default
Now Nginx should start automatically when you boot your machine next time. To test that run:
reboot
To make sure that Nginx is started run:
ps aux | grep nginx
You should get something like this:
263 root 0:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf 264 www 0:00 nginx: worker process 310 root 0:00 grep nginx
Testing Nginx
This section is assuming that nginx is running and sample html page "/www/index.html" is created. Launch a web browser and point it to your web server. You should get:
Server is online
Troubleshooting
If Nginx is not started check Nginx log file
less /var/log/nginx/error.log
Make sure that configuration file does not contain errors
vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Nginx with PHP
Setting Up Nginx with PHP
Setting Up Nginx as Reverse Proxy with acme (Let's Encrypt)