Installation and Basic configuration of Nginx on FreeBSD 10

As per Wikipedia, Nginx is an open source reverse proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, as well as a load balancer, HTTP cache, and a web server. It runs on FreeBSD too. Lets now see how to install Nginx on FreeBSD and to Configure it as a Webserver.

Now let us start off with the installation using the following command.

pkg install nginx

After installation, we would need to enable Nginx while booting. Append the following line in /etc/rc.conf

nginx_enable="YES"

The configuration file for Nginx is /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf. Now we can check whether the following lines are uncommented in the file, and change the values if needed.

worker_processes  1;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

sendfile        on;

keepalive_timeout  65;

server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

location / {
            root   /usr/local/www/nginx;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }
error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /usr/local/www/nginx-dist;
        }
    }
}

Let us now check if the syntax in the configuration is correct by using the following command.

service nginx configtest

We can now upload our own files to the folder /usr/local/www/nginx and run our website in this setup.

Once we make any change, we can reload the configuration using the following command.

service nginx reload

We can now load our website in the browser using the following URL. Replace ‘ip-address’ using the server’s IP.

http://ip-address