Install Nginx on Raspberry

4 min readFeb 23, 2021

Here are the steps to install it on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 4 with Debian OS (lite version ) that has 4 gigabytes of RAM and 16 GB Memory card Class 10. This OS has yum on it so it’d be so easy to install stuff into it. We just have to connect with wifi or ethernet

If you are not sure on how to setup raspberry pi checkout the following link:

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/raspberry-pi-setting-up/

Connect your Raspberry pi with SSH (in mac and ubuntu) or with Putty (in windows).

Run following commands to install nginx.

Step 1 : Update the packages.

sudo apt update

Step 2 : Install Nginx

sudo apt install nginx

Step 3 : Adjust the Firewall

Before testing Nginx, the firewall software needs to be adjusted to allow access to the service.

List the application configurations that ufw knows how to work with by typing:

Output:Available applications:  Nginx Full
  Nginx HTTP
  Nginx HTTPS

As you can see, there are three profiles available for Nginx:

Nginx Full: This profile opens both port 80 (normal, unencrypted web traffic) and port 443 (TLS/SSL encrypted traffic)
Nginx HTTP: This profile opens only port 80 (normal, unencrypted web traffic)
Nginx HTTPS: This profile opens only port 443 (TLS/SSL encrypted traffic)

It is recommended that you enable the most restrictive profile that will still allow the traffic you’ve configured. Since we haven’t configured SSL for our server yet in this guide, we will only need to allow traffic for HTTP on port 80.

You can enable this by typing:

sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'

You can verify the change by typing:

sudo ufw status

You should see HTTP traffic allowed in the displayed output:

Output:Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
OpenSSH                    ALLOW       Anywhere                  
Nginx HTTP                 ALLOW       Anywhere                  
OpenSSH (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
Nginx HTTP (v6)            ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

Step 4 : Check your Web Server

At the end of the installation process, Debian 10 starts Nginx. The web server should already be up and running.

We can check with the systemd init system to make sure the service is running by typing

systemctl status nginx

Check output:

Output● nginx.service - A high performance web server and a reverse proxy server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Wed 2019-07-03 12:52:54 UTC; 4min 23s ago
     Docs: man:nginx(8)
 Main PID: 3942 (nginx)
    Tasks: 3 (limit: 4719)
   Memory: 6.1M
   CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
           ├─3942 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on;
           ├─3943 nginx: worker process
           └─3944 nginx: worker process

As you can see above, the service appears to have started successfully. However, the best way to test this is to actually request a page from Nginx.

You can access the default Nginx landing page to confirm that the software is running properly by navigating to your server’s IP address. If you do not know your server’s IP address, try typing this at your server’s command prompt:

ip addr show eth0 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2; }' | sed 's/\/.*$//'

You will get back a few lines. You can try each in your web browser to see if they work.

When you have your server’s IP address, enter it into your browser’s address bar:

http://your_server_ip

You should see the default Nginx landing page. This page is included with Nginx to show you that the server is running correctly.

Step 5 : Managing the Nginx Process

Now that you have your web server up and running, let’s review some basic management commands.

To stop your web server, type:

sudo systemctl stop nginx

To start the web server when it is stopped, type:

sudo systemctl start nginx

To stop and then start the service again, type:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

If you are simply making configuration changes, Nginx can often reload without dropping connections. To do this, type:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

By default, Nginx is configured to start automatically when the server boots. If this is not what you want, you can disable this behavior by typing:

sudo systemctl disable nginx

To re-enable the service to start up at boot, you can type:

sudo systemctl enable nginx