HNG Internship "DevOps Stage 0 - NGINX Configuration"

#devops #nginx #internship #hng

As a DevOps Engineer, one of the first things you should learn is how to run applications on a server, using webservers like Nginx or Apache. These tools are essential for serving web content, managing traffic, and ensuring your applications are accessible to users. In this article, I will walk you through configuring Nginx to serve applications, a critical skill for anyone starting their DevOps journey.
Nginx is a web server that helps handle traffic loads while maintaining low resource usage, it can also function as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache.

Technical Architecture

Requirements

Linux Server
SSH key
Nginx
Web Application Code

Steps

Create a Linux Server on any cloud provider of your choice, for this article, I used the AWS cloud provider and launched an EC2 instance running on Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS.
When the instance is provisioned, ssh into the instance following these steps;

mv keys.pem ~/.ssh
chmod 400 ~/.ssh/keys.pem
ssh -i ~/.ssh/keys.pem ubuntu@<server-ip>

The next thing I did was to update the packages and install NGINX on the server using these commands;

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx -y

I then moved to the directory my application will be running in to edit the code using these commands;

cd /var/www/html
sudo nano index.html

Nginx configuration files are located in this directory '/etc/nginx/' in this file 'nginx.conf', but we will be using the configuration of the file in this directory '/etc/nginx/sites-available/default'

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
sudo nano default

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to nginx!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to DevOps Stage 0 -_ [Your Name]/[SlackName]</h1>
</body>
</html>

I used these commands to ensure nginx is enabled and running on the server;

sudo systemctl start nginx
sudo systemctl enable nginx
sudo systemctl status nginx

Then to ensure my application was running properly on the server, I went to the IP address of the server

http://<your-server-ip>/

Personal Growth

This task was pretty straightforward for me and I'll say the only challenge I faced was writing this article, I sort of overthought how I'd approach writing this article, but after doing a bit of research and reading some other people's articles, I found my direction and wrote it confidently. At the end of the day, it's all about how you approach a problem, break it down, and find the right way to solve it. This experience reinforced the importance of adaptability and learning from others while staying true to my thought process.

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