Initial Server Setup

Setting Up a Basic Firewall

ufw app list

Output
Available applications:
  OpenSSH

We need to make sure that the firewall allows SSH connections so that we can log back in next time. We can allow these connections by typing:

ufw allow OpenSSH

Afterwards, we can enable the firewall by typing:

ufw enable

Type “y” and press ENTER to proceed. You can see that SSH connections are still allowed by typing:

ufw status

Output
Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
OpenSSH                    ALLOW       Anywhere
OpenSSH (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

As the firewall is currently blocking all connections except for SSH, if you install and configure additional services, you will need to adjust the firewall settings to allow acceptable traffic in. You can learn some common UFW operations in this guide.

Step 1 – Installing Nginx

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

Step 2 – Adjusting the Firewall

sudo ufw app list

Output
Available applications:
  Nginx Full
  Nginx HTTP
  Nginx HTTPS
  OpenSSH

As you can see, there are three profiles available for Nginx:

• Nginx Full: This profile opens both port 80 (normal, unencrypted web traffic) and port 443 (TLS/SSL encrypted traffic)
• Nginx HTTP: This profile opens only port 80 (normal, unencrypted web traffic)
• Nginx HTTPS: This profile opens only port 443 (TLS/SSL encrypted traffic)

It is recommended that you enable the most restrictive profile that will still allow the traffic you’ve configured. Since we haven’t configured SSL for our server yet in this guide, we will only need to allow traffic on port 80.

sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'

sudo ufw status

Output
Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
OpenSSH                    ALLOW       Anywhere                  
Nginx HTTP                 ALLOW       Anywhere                  
OpenSSH (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
Nginx HTTP (v6)            ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

Step 3 – Checking your Web Server

systemctl status nginx

When you have your server’s IP address, enter it into your browser’s address bar:

http://your_server_ip

Step 4 – Managing the Nginx Process

Now that you have your web server up and running, let’s review some basic management commands.

To stop your web server, type:

• sudo systemctl stop nginx

To start the web server when it is stopped, type:

• sudo systemctl start nginx

To stop and then start the service again, type:

• sudo systemctl restart nginx

If you are simply making configuration changes, Nginx can often reload without dropping connections. To do this, type:

• sudo systemctl reload nginx

By default, Nginx is configured to start automatically when the server boots. If this is not what you want, you can disable this behavior by typing:

• sudo systemctl disable nginx

To re-enable the service to start up at boot, you can type:

• sudo systemctl enable nginx

Step 5 – Setting Up Server Blocks (Recommended)

Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04 has one server block enabled by default that is configured to serve documents out of a directory at /var/www/html. While this works well for a single site, it can become unwieldy if you are hosting multiple sites. Instead of modifying /var/www/html, let’s create a directory structure within /var/www for our example.com site, leaving /var/www/html in place as the default directory to be served if a client request doesn’t match any other sites.

Create the directory for example.com as follows, using the -p flag to create any necessary parent directories:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/html

Next, assign ownership of the directory with the $USER environment variable:

• sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.com/html

The permissions of your web roots should be correct if you haven’t modified your umask value, but you can make sure by typing:

• sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/example.com

Next, create a sample index.html page using nano or your favorite editor:

• nano /var/www/example.com/html/index.html

Inside, add the following sample HTML:

/var/www/example.com/html/index.html

    
        Welcome to Example.com!
    
    Success!  The example.com server block is working!
    

Save and close the file when you are finished.

In order for Nginx to serve this content, it’s necessary to create a server block with the correct directives. Instead of modifying the default configuration file directly, let’s make a new one at /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

Paste in the following configuration block, which is similar to the default, but updated for our new directory and domain name:

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        root /var/www/example.com/html;
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name example.com www.example.com;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

...
http {
    ...
    server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
    ...
}
...

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Success!  The example.com server block is working!