Status: Deprecated

This article covers a version of Ubuntu that is no longer supported. If you are currently operate a server running Ubuntu 12.04, we highly recommend upgrading or migrating to a supported version of Ubuntu:

Upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04.
Upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04
Migrate the server data to a supported version

Reason:
Ubuntu 12.04 reached end of life (EOL) on April 28, 2017 and no longer receives security patches or updates. This guide is no longer maintained.
See Instead:
This guide might still be useful as a reference, but may not work on other Ubuntu releases. If available, we strongly recommend using a guide written for the version of Ubuntu you are using. You can use the search functionality at the top of the page to find a more recent version.

About nginx

nginx is a high performance web server software. It is a much more flexible and lightweight program than apache.

Set Up

The steps in this tutorial require the user to have root privileges. You can see how to set that up in the Initial Server Setup Tutorial in steps 3 and 4.

Step One—Install nginx

To install nginx, open terminal and type in:

sudo apt-get install nginx

When prompted, say yes. nginx is now installed on your virtual private server.

Step Two—Start nginx

nginx does not start on its own. To get nginx running on your VPS, type:

sudo service nginx start

Step Three—RESULTS: Confirm That nginx Has Started

You can confirm that nginx has been installed as your web server by directing your browser to your IP address.
**You can run the following command to reveal your virtual server’s IP address.

ifconfig eth0 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2 }'

When you visit your IP address page in your browser, you will see the words, “Welcome to nginx”
You can see a screenshot of the utilitarian nginx welcome page here
To ensure that nginx will be up after reboots, it’s best to add it to the startup.
Type this command into terminal:

update-rc.d nginx defaults

You may see a message like:

System start/stop links for /etc/init.d/nginx already exist.

If that is the case, then nginx is set up to run on startup, and you are all set.
Congratulations! You have now installed nginx

See More

Once you have installed nginx on your virtual private server, you can do a variety of things on your server such as Set Up Virtual Hosts or Create an SSL certificate for your site
By Etel Sverdlov