NGINX installation on Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu

Last Updated on January 14, 2024 by cscontents

Table of Contents

Introduction

In this article we will guide you through nginx installation. We will see installation on both Red Hat Linux & Ubuntu.

Prerequisite Knowledge

Knowledge of NGINX
Basic knowledge of networking

Installation steps of NGINX on Red Hat Linux

Below are the steps to install NGINX on Red Hat Linux –

Step 1: Enable NGINX module

On Red Hat Linux we need to enable the NGINX module first.

Before enabling we can check if nginx module is already enabled or not –

sudo yum module list nginx

The above command will list all the nginx module. If you see the nginx module with the required version is enabled, then no need to enable it again.

Otherwise, we need to execute below command on Red Hat Linux to enable the NGINX module. Here we will install nginx 1.16, so we will enable nginx 1.16. If you want different version, then enable that version by mentioning the version.

sudo yum module enable nginx:1.16

Step 2: Install NGINX

Once required nginx module is enabled, now we need to install it.

sudo yum install nginx

Step 3: Start NGINX

Now we need to start nginx.

sudo systemctl start nginx

Step 4: Check status of NGINX

To check the status of nginx, we need to run the below command.

sudo systemctl status nginx

In our case output of the above command is below.

nginx.service - The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server  
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Tue 2022-11-29 03:12:32 UTC; 2s ago
  Process: 6133 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 6131 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/nginx -t (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 6129 ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/rm -f /run/nginx.pid (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 6134 (nginx)
    Tasks: 3 (limit: 23900)
   Memory: 3.1M
   CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
           ├─6134 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx
           ├─6135 nginx: worker process
           └─6136 nginx: worker process

Nov 29 03:12:32 nginx-machine systemd[1]: Starting The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server...
Nov 29 03:12:32 nginx-machine nginx[6131]: nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
Nov 29 03:12:32 nginx-machine nginx[6131]: nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
Nov 29 03:12:32 nginx-machine systemd[1]: Started The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server.

Step 5: Access NGINX home page from browser

To access the nginx homepage, we need to allow port 80 (default port for nginx is 80) in the OS level firewall of Red Hat Linux.

Now there is two option –

If you don’t want to use firewalld, then you can stop it and disable it by running below command.

sudo systemctl stop firewalld

sudo systemctl disable firewalld

If you want to continue with firewalld, then you need to allow the port 80 in firewalld. Below is the command by which we can allow port 80.

We can check which ports are already allowed by running below command.

sudo firewall-cmd --list-ports

We can allow port 80 by running below command.

sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=80/tcp

If you are using VM from cloud platform like Azure or AWS or GCP then you need to allow port 80 at the network layer by logging into concerned cloud portal. You need to add an inbound security rule with port 80.

If you want to change the default port then you need to modify the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file.

Now, you can try accessing NGINX from any browse by typing http://public_ip_of_your_machine:80

Installation steps of NGINX on Ubuntu

Below are the steps to install nginx on ubuntu.

Step 1: Install NGINX

To install on Ubuntu, we need to execute the below commands one by one.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install nginx -y

Step 2: Check the status of NGINX

Once we are done with installation, we can check the status –

systemctl status nginx

Thank You.

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