Page Last Updated: 2024 March 06

N.B. This page is awaiting a revamp as of July ‘23.

Notes on Nginx Setup

First Steps

Installing Nginx (pronounced “engine-X”) is pretty straightforward. Assuming we don’t need to set any unusual configuration options, the Debian package is the easiest way to get started. To do this:

• sudo apt-get install nginx

Having done that, let’s make sure we have backup copies of our configuration files in case something goes wrong:

sudo cp /etc/nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.backup

#Or, for a fancier version that preserves the date as part of the filename:
sudo cp /etc/nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.$(date "+%b_%d_%Y_%H.%M.%S")

Nginx Configuration

While this section is developed, there is an excellent guide for nginx on Debian Jessie here.

Setting up for PHP and MySQL/MariaDB support

Nginx is lightweight and modular. As such, certain features that are standard on Apache need to be enabled.

Let’s see some more notes on PHP and Database setup here.

Optimizing for Speed

Nginx is pretty fast, but we can always do better. Let’s look at this guide.