Setting up Nginx on AWS ec2

Wednesday, 8 March 2017 nginx code ec2

Quick setup for Nginx on a fresh ec2 Instance

So this is a quick one. I just went through setting up Nginx on ec2 for this very blog and was surprised how easy it was. so here’s a quick how to

1. Lets install nginx

$ sudo yum install -y nginx
$ which nginx
/usr/sbin/nginx

2. Start the service and verify you can hit it

$ sudo service nginx start

now hit the server with the browser and you should see nginx default page. by default nginx serves html from /user/share/nginx/html. We need to specify our own directory to serve from. So let’s do that next.

3. Lets create a directory to serve html from

we need to also modify permisson so that nginx can read from there

$ mkdir /var/www
$ sudo chmod -R 755 /var/wwww

4. Modify nginx config to point to the new directory

Nginx config file is located in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. Open it with your favorite editor and modify the following section

before:

server {
  listen          80 default_server;
  listen          [::]:80 default_server;
  server_name     localhost;
  root            /user/share/nginx/html  
  ...
}

after:

server {
  listen          80 default_server;
  listen          [::]:80 default_server;
  server_name     localhost;
  root            /var/www/myProject/dist; 
  ...
}

5. Restart nginx

$ sudo service nginx restart

Try hitting the server again, you should now be able to serve your project content over nginx! Over to you.