Nginx

Nginx is a high-performance web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer that powers a large share of the busiest sites on the internet. It serves static content efficiently, proxies requests to application backends, and terminates TLS with a small memory footprint.

Software included

Component	Version
Nginx	1.30.3
Ubuntu	24.04 LTS

Getting started

1. Connect to your VM

ssh ubuntu@<your-vm-ip>

2. Verify Nginx is running

There is no first-boot configuration. Nginx starts immediately after the VM boots.

systemctl status nginx

3. Access the default site

Open a browser and navigate to:

http://<your-vm-ip>

You can also verify the response from the VM:

curl -I http://localhost

Managing Nginx

# Check service status
systemctl status nginx

# Validate the configuration
sudo nginx -t

# Restart
sudo systemctl restart nginx

# View logs
sudo journalctl -u nginx -f

Path	Purpose
`/etc/nginx/nginx.conf`	Main configuration
`/etc/nginx/conf.d/`	Server and proxy configuration
`/usr/share/nginx/html/`	Default web root

Security

Ports 80 and 443 are open on the VM’s network interface. UFW is enabled and allows HTTP (port 80), HTTPS (port 443), and SSH (port 22). Nginx serves HTTP on port 80 by default. Port 443 has no TLS listener until you configure a certificate and HTTPS server block.

To restrict HTTP and HTTPS to a specific IP:

sudo ufw delete allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw delete allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw allow from <trusted-ip> to any port 80
sudo ufw allow from <trusted-ip> to any port 443

To access the default site without leaving port 80 open, use an SSH tunnel:

# Run this on your local machine
ssh -L 8080:localhost:80 ubuntu@<your-vm-ip>

# Then open in a browser
http://localhost:8080

For production use, configure Nginx with a trusted TLS certificate and serve public sites on port 443. Nginx does not add authentication to proxied services, so protect each upstream application separately.