How to Install Nginx on CentOS 8

Miroslav Micic

4 years ago

Nginx (Engine X) is a most popular, powerful and high-performance open-source HTTP web server and reverse proxy server with a scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. It can be used as a standalone web server, load balancer, content cache, and reverse proxy for HTTP and non-HTTP servers.
In this article, we will explain how to install the Nginx HTTP web server on a CentOS 8 Linux server.

Prerequisites

Before continuing, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges, and you don’t have Apache or any other process running on port 80 or 443.

Installing Nginx on CentOS 8

To install the latest version of Nginx web server, you need to update the system software packages using the following yum command.

# dnf -y update

Once software updates installed, you can install the latest stable Nginx server from the default package repositories using the following commands.

# dnf -y install nginx

Once Nginx installed, you can start, enable and verify the status by running following systemctl commands

# systemctl enable nginx
# systemctl start nginx

To verify that the service is running, check its status:

# systemctl status nginx

Example output:

# systemctl status nginx
● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Thu 2020-02-13 18:03:33 UTC; 9s ago
  Process: 20429 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 20427 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/nginx -t (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 20426 ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/rm -f /run/nginx.pid (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 20431 (nginx)
    Tasks: 2 (limit: 5067)
   Memory: 11.6M
   CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
           ├─20431 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx
           └─20432 nginx: worker process

Feb 13 18:03:32 lintutloc systemd[1]: Starting The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server...
Feb 13 18:03:32 lintutloc nginx[20427]: nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
Feb 13 18:03:32 lintutloc nginx[20427]: nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
Feb 13 18:03:32 lintutloc systemd[1]: nginx.service: Failed to parse PID from file /run/nginx.pid: Invalid argument
Feb 13 18:03:33 lintutloc systemd[1]: Started The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server.

[box type=”info” align=”” class=”” width=””]Commands to start/stop/restart nginx server
Run command as per your needs.

# systemctl start nginx ## &lt-- start the server ##
# systemctl stop nginx ## &lt-- stop the server ##
# systemctl restart nginx ## &lt-- restart the server ##
# systemctl reload nginx ## &lt-- reload the server ##
# systemctl status nginx ## &lt-- get status of the server ##

[/box]

Adjusting the Firewall

Open and enable port 80 and 443 to allow web traffic on Nginx on the system firewall using following firewall-cmd commands.

# firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-service=http
# firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-service=https
# firewall-cmd --reload

Now, you can test your Nginx installation, by opening http://YOUR_IP in your web browser. You should see the default Nginx welcome page, which should look like the image below:

Nginx Configuration File’s Structure and Best Practices

All Nginx configuration files are located in the /etc/nginx/ directory.
The main Nginx configuration file is /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.
Creating a separate configuration file for each domain makes the server easier to maintain.
The Nginx server block files must end with .conf and be stored in /etc/nginx/conf.d directory. You can have as many server blocks as you want.
It is a good practice to follow a standard naming convention. For example, if the domain name is mydomain.com then the configuration file should be named mydomain.com.conf
If you use repeatable configuration segments in your domain server blocks, it is a good idea to refactor those segments into snippets.
Nginx log files (access.log and error.log) are located in the /var/log/nginx/ directory. It is recommended to have a different access and error log files for each server block.
You can set your domain document root directory to any location you want. The most common locations for webroot include:
- /home/<user_name>/<site_name>
- /var/www/<site_name>
- /var/www/html/<site_name>
- /opt/<site_name>
- /usr/share/nginx/html

Conclusion

Congratulations, you have successfully installed Nginx on your CentOS 8 server. You’re now ready to start deploying your applications and use Nginx as a web or proxy server.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.