How to install NGINX on Ubuntu

Nginx is one of the most famous & widely used web servers. Nginx not only acts as a web server but can also work as a mail proxy server, reverse proxy, cache server as well as a load balancer.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install NGINX on Ubuntu using the Ubuntu system repositories & also with using Nginx repositories.

Recommended Read: How to install Nginx on CentOS/RHEL

Also Read: Localhost 127.0.0.1 – Setup your own Web Server

So let’s get start.

Install Nginx on Ubuntu using the Ubuntu repositories

nginx is maintained on the default Ubuntu repositories & can be installed with the default package manager i.e. apt. To install Nginx on Ubuntu, run the following command,

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

$ sudo apt install nginx

Once the nginx is installed, the nginx service will install by default. We can check it by running the following command,

$ systemctl status nginx

or

$ ps -ef | grep nginx

If it’s not running, we can start the server by the following command,

$ systemctl start nginx

To enable the nginx service at the boot time, execute the following command,

$ systemctl enable nginx

Once the webserver is up and running, we can also access the default webpage for Nginx. All we need is the system IP address or if you are trying to access the webpage on the localhost, then we can also access the webpage with either ‘localhost’ or ‘127.0.0.1’ as the URL.

http://IP_address_of_the_system 

or

http://localhost

Install Nginx using the Official Nginx Repositories

To install the official nginx repositories, we need to first install the keys that are used to sign the NGINX packages,

$ sudo wget https://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key

$ sudo apt-key add nginx_signing.key

Next, we will add the repositories in the file ‘/etc/sources.list’,

$ vim /etc/sources/list 

deb https://nginx.org/packages/mainline/ubuntu/ <CODENAME> nginx

deb-src https://nginx.org/packages/mainline/ubuntu/ <CODENAME> nginx

Here, <CODENAME> refers to the code the Ubuntu version being used, list is mentioned below,

So for Ubuntu 20.04, we need to add the following entries to ‘/etc/sources.list’,

deb https://nginx.org/packages/mainline/ubuntu/ groovy nginx

deb-src https://nginx.org/packages/mainline/ubuntu/ groovy nginx

Once done, save the file & exit & run the following command to install nginx on Ubuntu,

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

$ sudo apt install nginx

Check the Nginx service & access the webserver to access the default webpage. So this completes our tutorial on how to install Nginx on Ubuntu. In our next tutorial, we will discuss how we can create the webserver blocks to host multiple websites on a single Nginx webserver.