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How To Set Up Nginx Server Blocks

This document provides instructions for setting up server blocks (virtual hosts) in Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04 to host multiple domains from a single server. It involves creating document root directories for each domain, sample HTML files, server block configuration files that define the domain name and document root, and enabling the server blocks by linking them to Nginx's sites-enabled directory. Finally, Nginx is restarted to load the new configuration.

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Rycko Pareira
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© © All Rights Reserved
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123 views

How To Set Up Nginx Server Blocks

This document provides instructions for setting up server blocks (virtual hosts) in Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04 to host multiple domains from a single server. It involves creating document root directories for each domain, sample HTML files, server block configuration files that define the domain name and document root, and enabling the server blocks by linking them to Nginx's sites-enabled directory. Finally, Nginx is restarted to load the new configuration.

Uploaded by

Rycko Pareira
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How To Set Up Nginx Server

Blocks (Virtual Hosts) on


Ubuntu 16.04
PostedMay 19, 2016 283.7k
views
GETTING STARTED NGINX UBUNTU UBUNTU 16.04

Introduction
When using the Nginx web server, server blocks (similar
to the virtual hosts in Apache) can be used to encapsulate
configuration details and host more than one domain off of
a single server.
In this guide, we'll discuss how to configure server blocks
in Nginx on an Ubuntu 16.04 server.

Prerequisites
We're going to be using a non-root user with sudo
privileges throughout this tutorial. If you do not have a
user like this configured, you can create one by following
our Ubuntu 16.04 initial server setup guide.
You will also need to have Nginx installed on your server.
The following guides cover this procedure:
How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04: Use this guide to
set up Nginx on its own.
How To Install Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP (LEMP stack)
in Ubuntu 16.04: Use this guide if you will be using
Nginx in conjunction with MySQL and PHP.
When you have fulfilled these requirements, you can
continue on with this guide.

Example Configuration
For demonstration purposes, we're going to set up two
domains with our Nginx server. The domain names we'll
use in this guide are example.com and test.com.
You can find a guide on how to set up domain names with
DigitalOcean here. If you do not have two spare domain
names to play with, use dummy names for now and we'll
show you later how to configure your local computer to
test your configuration.

Step One: Set Up New


Document Root Directories
By default, Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04 has one server block
enabled by default. It is configured to serve documents out
of a directory at /var/www/html.
While this works well for a single site, we need additional
directories if we're going to serve multiple sites. We can
consider the /var/www/html directory the default directory
that will be served if the client request doesn't match any
of our other sites.
We will create a directory structure within /var/www for
each of our sites. The actual web content will be placed in
an html directory within these site-specific directories. This
gives us some additional flexibility to create other
directories associated with our sites as siblings to the html
directory if necessary.
We need to create these directories for each of our sites.
The -p flag tells mkdir to create any necessary parent
directories along the way:
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/html
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/test.com/html
Now that we have our directories, we will reassign
ownership of the web directories to our normal user
account. This will let us write to them without sudo.

Note
Depending on your needs, you might need to adjust the
permissions or ownership of the folders again to allow certain
access to the www-data user. For instance, dynamic sites will
often need this. The specific permissions and ownership
requirements entirely depend on what your configuration.
Follow the recommendations for the specific technology you're
using.

We can use the $USER environmental variable to assign


ownership to the account that we are currently signed in
on (make sure you're not logged in as root). This will allow
us to easily create or edit the content in this directory:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.com/html
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/test.com/html
The permissions of our web roots should be correct
already if you have not modified your umask value, but we
can make sure by typing:
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www
Our directory structure is now configured and we can
move on.

Step Two: Create Sample Pages


for Each Site
Now that we have our directory structure set up, let's
create a default page for each of our sites so that we will
have something to display.
Create an index.html file in your first domain:
nano /var/www/example.com/html/index.html
Inside the file, we'll create a really basic file that indicates
what site we are currently accessing. It will look like this:
/var/www/example.com/html/index.html
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to Example.com!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Success! The example.com server block is
working!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Save and close the file when you are finished.
Since the file for our second site is basically going to be
the same, we can copy it over to our second document
root like this:
cp /var/www/example.com/html/index.html
/var/www/test.com/html/
Now, we can open the new file in our editor:
nano /var/www/test.com/html/index.html
Modify it so that it refers to our second domain:
/var/www/test.com/html/index.html
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to Test.com!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Success! The test.com server block is working!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Save and close this file when you are finished. We now
have some pages to display to visitors of our two domains.

Step Three: Create Server Block


Files for Each Domain
Now that we have the content we wish to serve, we need
to actually create the server blocks that will tell Nginx how
to do this.
By default, Nginx contains one server block called default
which we can use as a template for our own
configurations. We will begin by designing our first
domain's server block, which we will then copy over for
our second domain and make the necessary
modifications.
Create the First Server Block File
As mentioned above, we will create our first server block
config file by copying over the default file:
sudo cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-
available/example.com
Now, open the new file you created in your text editor with
sudo privileges:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
Ignoring the commented lines, the file will look similar to
this:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;

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

server_name _;

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}
First, we need to look at the listen directives. Only one of
our server blocks on the server can have the
default_server option enabled. This specifies which block
should serve a request if the server_name requested does
not match any of the available server blocks. This
shouldn't happen very frequently in real world scenarios
since visitors will be accessing your site through your
domain name.
You can choose to designate one of your sites as the
"default" by including the default_server option in the listen
directive, or you can leave the default server block
enabled, which will serve the content of the /var/www/html
directory if the requested host cannot be found.
In this guide, we'll leave the default server block in place
to server non-matching requests, so we'll remove the
default_server from this and the next server block. You can
choose to add the option to whichever of your server
blocks makes sense to you.
/etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;

...
}
Note
You can check that the default_server option is only enabled
in a single active file by typing:
grep -R default_server /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
If matches are found uncommented in more than on file
(shown in the leftmost column), Nginx will complain about an
invalid configuration.
The next thing we're going to have to adjust is the
document root, specified by the root directive. Point it to
the site's document root that you created:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;

root /var/www/example.com/html;

}
Next, we need to modify the server_name to match
requests for our first domain. We can additionally add any
aliases that we want to match. We will add a
www.example.com alias to demonstrate.
When you are finished, your file will look something like
this:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
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;
}
}
That is all we need for a basic configuration. Save and
close the file to exit.
Create the Second Server Block File
Now that we have our initial server block configuration, we
can use that as a basis for our second file. Copy it over to
create a new file:
sudo cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-
available/test.com
Open the new file with sudo privileges in your editor:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/test.com
Again, make sure that you do not use the default_server
option for the listen directive in this file if you've already
used it elsewhere. Adjust the root directive to point to your
second domain's document root and adjust the
server_name to match your second site's domain name
(make sure to include any aliases).
When you are finished, your file will likely look something
like this:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/test.com
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;

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

server_name test.com www.test.com;

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}
When you are finished, save and close the file.

Step Four: Enable your Server


Blocks and Restart Nginx
Now that we have our server block files, we need to
enable them. We can do this by creating symbolic links
from these files to the sites-enabled directory, which Nginx
reads from during startup.
We can create these links by typing:
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/test.com /etc/nginx/sites-
enabled/
These files are now in the enabled directory. We now
have three server blocks enabled, which are configured to
respond based on their listen directive and the
server_name (you can read more about how Nginx
processes these directives here):
example.com: Will respond to requests for example.com
and www.example.com
test.com: Will respond to requests for test.com and
www.test.com
default: Will respond to any requests on port 80 that do
not match the other two blocks.
In order to avoid a possible hash bucket memory problem
that can arise from adding additional server names, we
will go ahead and adjust a single value within our
/etc/nginx/nginx.conf file. Open the file now:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Within the file, find the server_names_hash_bucket_size
directive. Remove the # symbol to uncomment the line:
/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
http {
...

server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;

...
}
Save and close the file when you are finished.
Next, test to make sure that there are no syntax errors in
any of your Nginx files:
sudo nginx -t
If no problems were found, restart Nginx to enable your
changes:
sudo systemctl restart nginx
Nginx should now be serving both of your domain names.
Step Five: Modify Your Local
Hosts File for Testing(Optional)
If you have not been using domain names that you own
and instead have been using dummy values, you can
modify your local computer's configuration to let you to
temporarily test your Nginx server block configuration.
This will not allow other visitors to view your site correctly,
but it will give you the ability to reach each site
independently and test your configuration. This basically
works by intercepting requests that would usually go to
DNS to resolve domain names. Instead, we can set the IP
addresses we want our local computer to go to when we
request the domain names.

Note
Make sure you are operating on your local computer during
these steps and not your VPS server. You will need to have
root access, be a member of the administrative group, or
otherwise be able to edit system files to do this.

If you are on a Mac or Linux computer at home, you can


edit the file needed by typing:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
If you are on Windows, you can find instructions for
altering your hosts file here.
You need to know your server's public IP address and the
domains you want to route to the server. Assuming that
my server's public IP address is 203.0.113.5, the lines I
would add to my file would look something like this:
/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
...

203.0.113.5 example.com www.example.com


203.0.113.5 test.com www.test.com
This will intercept any requests for example.com and
test.com and send them to your server, which is what we
want if we don't actually own the domains that we are
using.
Save and close the file when you are finished.

Step Six: Test your Results


Now that you are all set up, you should test that your
server blocks are functioning correctly. You can do that by
visiting the domains in your web browser:
http://example.com
You should see a page that looks like this:

If you visit your second domain name, you should see a


slightly different site:
http://test.com
If both of these sites work, you have successfully
configured two independent server blocks with Nginx.
At this point, if you adjusted your hosts file on your local
computer in order to test, you'll probably want to remove
the lines you added.
If you need domain name access to your server for a
public-facing site, you will probably want to purchase a
domain name for each of your sites. You can learn how to
set them up to point to your server here.

Conclusion
You should now have the ability to create server blocks for
each domain you wish to host from the same server.
There aren't any real limits on the number of server blocks
you can create, so long as your hardware can handle the
traffic

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