This guide is fairly barebones as NGINX installation is a well covered topic. You can think of this article as a cheatcheat for managinging the NGINX server process, as well as where to find config files.

Install NGINX

sudo apt install nginx

NGINX should now be running on port 80. Check this by navigating to port 80 of your Pi, http://pi1.local/. You should see a “Welcome to NGINX” screen. Make sure to replace pi1.local with the IP address of your Raspberry Pi.

Starting, stopping and restarting NGINX

The following commands show how to manage the NGINX server itself.

Starting NGINX

sudo systemctl start nginx

Stopping NGINX

sudo systemctl stop nginx

Restarting NGINX

If you change configurations you may need to restart NGINX in order for the changes to take effect.

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Start NGINX at boot

Run the following command to tell systemd to automatically start NGINX at boot

sudo systemctl enable nginx

If you’d like to disable NGINX running at boot, try the following command

sudo systemctl disable nginx

NGINX config files locations

• General config: /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
• Virtual host config: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Lastly, to make development easier, give the unix group pi read, write and execute permissions to the NGINX root sites folder:

sudo chown -R www-data:pi /var/www/html/
sudo chmod -R 770 /var/www/html/