Jun 23, 2020 · 3 min read

How to Install Nginx and Setting Up Server Block to Domain on AWS EC2

Before beginning this guide, first you must have an EC2 Instance, you can follow this post to launch an EC2 instance.

In this post, I use EC2 Instance of Ubuntu Server 18.04, and access the instance using SSH connection in a terminal of my Ubuntu Desktop, follow this post to connect to EC2 instance.

Configure security group of your instance to add HTTP & HTTPS connection in inbound traffic, you can follow this post to configure security group.

Prepare a domain or subdomain, added using A Record that pointing to public IP4 address of your instance, either default IP4 address or Elastic IP4 address.

Install Nginx

Update Packages

sudo apt update

Install Nginx

sudo apt install nginx

Check Nginx Status

sudo service nginx status

Open your instance detail and copy public DNS or public IP Address

Open a browser and paste it to check that Nginx successfully installed

Setting Up Nginx Server Block

When using the Nginx web server, server blocks (similar to virtual hosts in Apache) can be used to encapsulate configuration details and host more than one domain from a single server [ref].

In this post, I will set up my subdomain called api.budidev.com, but you should replace this with your own domain or subdomain name.

Create Directory and index.html Sample File

Create directory for api.budidev.com

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/api.budidev.com/html

Assign ownership of the directory to current login user

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/api.budidev.com/html

Create a sample index.html using nano

nano /var/www/api.budidev.com/html/index.html

Fill the index.html like the example below

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Welcome to api.budidev.com</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Success!  The api.budidev.com server block is working!</h1>
    </body>
</html>

Create New Nginx Server Block

Create new configuration server block file called api.budidev.com

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/api.budidev.com

Fill the content like the example below

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

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

  server_name api.budidev.com;

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

Enable the api.budidev.com configuration file by creating a link from it to the sites-enabled directory

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

Configure Nginx

To avoid a possible hash bucket memory problem that can arise from adding additional server names, it is necessary to adjust a single value in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file [ref].

Open nginx.conf file

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Find the server_names_hash_bucket_size and remove the # symbol to uncomment the line

http {
    server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
}

Test Nginx configuration

sudo nginx -t

If there aren’t any problems, restart Nginx to enable changes

sudo service nginx restart

Nginx should now serve your domain or subdomain. You can test this using browser by navigating to http:‎//your-domain-subdomain.com, for me is http://‎api.budidev.com

Install Nginx

Setting Up Nginx Server Block

Create Directory and index.html Sample File

Create New Nginx Server Block

Configure Nginx

See Also