Introduction
Nginx is a popular high-performance web server. This tutorial will teach you how to install and launch Nginx on your CentOS 7 server.
Prerequisites
The steps in this tutorial require a non-root user with sudo privileges. See our tutorial Initial Server Setup with CentOS 7 to learn how to set up this user.
Step 1 — Add
the EPEL software repository To add the CentOS 7 EPEL repository,
first connect to your CentOS 7 machine via SSH, then use the yum command to install the extended package repository:
- sudo yum install epel-release
You will be prompted to verify that you want to install the software. Type y, and then ENTER to continue.
Next, you will install the actual nginx software package.
Step 2 — Installing Nginx
Now that the EPEL repository is installed on your server
, install Nginx using the following yum command:
- sudo yum install nginx
Again, answer yes to the verification message, then
Nginx will finish installing.
Step 3 — Nginx startup
Nginx
will not start automatically after it is installed. To run Nginx, use the command
systemctl: sudo systemctl start nginx
You can check the status of the service with
systemctl status:
- sudo systemctl status
nginx Output● nginx.service – The nginx HTTP server and reverse proxy Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/
- nginx.service
; disabled; provider preset: disabled) Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-01-24 20:14:24 UTC; 5s Aug Process: 1898 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Process: 1896 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/nginx -t (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Process: 1895 ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/rm -f /run/nginx.pid (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Main PID: 1900 (nginx) CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service ├─1900 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx └─1901 nginx: worker process Jan 24 20:14:24 centos-updates systemd[1]: Starting nginx HTTP server and reverse proxy… Jan 24 20:14:24 centos-updates nginx[1896]: nginx: the syntax of the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf is fine Jan 24 20:14:24 centos-updates nginx[1896]: nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful Jan 24 20:14:24 centos-updates systemd[1]: Started http server and nginx reverse proxy.
The service must be active.
If you are running a firewall, run the following commands to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic
: sudo firewall-cmd -permanent -zone=public -add-service=http sudo firewall-cmd -permanent -zone=
- public –
- add-service=https sudo firewall-cmd –
- reload
You can do a random check right away to verify that everything went as planned by visiting your server’s public IP address in your web browser:
http://server_domain_name_or_IP/
You will see the default webpage of CentOS 7 Nginx, which is there for informational and testing purposes. It should look something like this:
If you see this page, then your web server is now installed correctly
.
Before proceeding, you’ll probably want to enable Nginx to launch when your system boots. To do this, type the following command:
- sudo systemctl enable nginx Nginx
is now installed and running
.
Step 4 — Explore and configure
Nginx
If you want to start serving your own pages or applications through Nginx, you’ll want to know the locations of the Nginx configuration files and the default root directory of the
server.
Default
server root The default server root directory is /usr/share/nginx/html. The files that are placed there will be served on your web server. This location is specified in the default server block configuration file that is included with Nginx, which is located in /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.
Any
additional server blocks, known as virtual hosts in Apache, can be added by creating new configuration files in /etc/nginx/conf.d. Files ending with .conf in that directory will be loaded when Nginx starts.
Nginx
Global Settings
The main Nginx configuration file is located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. This is where you can change settings such as the user running the Nginx daemon processes and the number of worker processes that are generated when Nginx is running, among other things.
Conclusion
Once you have installed Nginx on your CentOS 7 server, you can continue to install the full LEMP stack on CentOS 7.
