Installing and configuring NGINX

Apache isn’t the only technology that is capable of allowing you to host web content on your server. NGINX also serves the same purpose and is gaining popularity quite rapidly. Apache is still a great option, and even if that’s your chosen web server software, it’s a good idea to at least be familiar with NGINX and learn its basics. NGINX itself is a proxy server as well but is capable of also serving web content, which is why it competes with Apache.

Before we do so, I want to mention first that you can really only have one web server service running on a single web server. If you’ve been following along up to now, you currently have a functional Apache web server. If you were to also install NGINX, it probably wouldn’t start as the ports it wants to listen on (port 80 and/or 443) will already be in use. You can run both on a single server, but that’s outside the scope of this book. Ideally, you’...