Installing Nginx

Installing Nginx is easy. Use the following commands to install Nginx.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

Configuring Nginx

There are many ways for configuring Nginx depending on use cases. This article shows you how to configure Nginx as a reverse proxy mapping a certain port to another, e.g. port 80 to 8080.

First, let's remove the default configuration.

sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Then, create a new configuration file in /etc/nginx/sites-available directory. Let say we create mysite file.

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
touch mysite

Edit mysite file using your favorite editor. My favorite one is the vim editor, thus I can use this command.

sudo vim mysite

In the file, add the configuration as follows.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name mysite.com;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   Host $http_host;
        proxy_pass         "http://127.0.0.1:8080";
    }
}

In the above configuration, when someone visits mysite.com, the request will be redirected to the application published in the port 8080. You can change those parameters as you need.

Next, we have to create symlink of that file, to the '/etc/nginx/sites-enabled' directory using the following command.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mysite

Finally, to apply the configuration, restart the nginx service.

sudo service nginx restart

Now you can visit your website.