Hosting a Web App with Nginx on Ubuntu: A Step-by-Step Guide

Deploying a web app doesn’t have to be complicated. Whether you're launching a personal project, a company landing page, or just testing the waters, Nginx on Ubuntu provides a fast, efficient, and scalable way to serve your web content. In this guide, we'll walk through provisioning an Ubuntu server, installing Nginx, and hosting an HTML page. Let's get started.

Step 1: Provision an Ubuntu Server

Before hosting your web app, you need a server. If you don’t already have one, you can quickly spin up an Ubuntu Server using any cloud provider like AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, or even a local Virtual Machine.

I will be using AWS EC2 in this guide:

• Navigate to the EC2 dashboard and launch an instance.

• Choose an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

• Select an instance type (t2.micro for testing is fine).

• Configure security groups to allow SSH (port 22) and HTTP (port 80) traffic.

Launch the instance and connect to it via SSH:

  ssh ubuntu@your-server-ip -i your-key.pem

Step 2: Install Nginx

Once you're logged into your Ubuntu server, the first thing you need to do is install Nginx, which will act as your web server.

• Update your package list to ensure you have the latest versions:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

• Install nginx:

  sudo apt install nginx -y

• Start and enable the nginx server to ensure it's running:

  sudo systemctl start nginx
  sudo systemctl enable nginx

• Verify nginx is running:

  sudo systemctl status nginx

You should see this output:

Step 3: Build and Host Your HTML Page

Now that Nginx is running, it's time to serve your custom HTML page.

• Navigate to the default web root directory:

  cd /var/www/html

• Remove the default index.html file (optional):

  sudo rm index.nginx-debian.html

• Create a new index.html file:

  sudo nana index.html

• Add your custom html content
• Save the file (CTRL + X, then Y, then Enter) -Restart nginx to apply changes

  sudo systemctl restart nginx

• You can view your page with the public IP of your server.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve successfully set up an Nginx web server on Ubuntu and hosted a simple HTML page. This is just the beginning.

Need more insights or facing any issues? Drop your questions in the comments! You can also connect on LinkedIn or X.

Looking to hire Engineers?
DevOps Engineers
Cloud Engineers