In this blog post we describe the procedure to install nginx on a FreeBSD VM.
Install nginx
Let’s ssh into the machine and install nginx:
ssh -A cunnie@shay.nono.com
sudo pkg_add -r nginx
Like homebrew, FreeBSD typically installs optional applications under /usr/local. For example, nginx’s configuration file is located at /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf.
Place /usr/local/etc under Revision Control and [Optional] Publish
We place /usr/local/etc under revision control & publish it to a public repo on github. We generally do not recommend publishing configuration directories to public repos; in this particular case we’re doing it for instructive purposes.
cd /usr/local/etc
sudo -E git init
sudo -E git add .
sudo -E git commit -m"Initial commit"
sudo -E git remote add origin git@github.com:cunnie/shay.nono.com-usr-local-etc.git
sudo -E git push -u origin master
We can browse the new repo here.
Start nginx and check
We configure our FreeBSD machine to start nginx on boot. Additionally, we start nginx manually to begin our tests:
echo 'nginx_enable="YES"' | sudo tee -a /etc/rc.conf
sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/nginx start
We browse http://shay.nono.com to ensure we see the “Welcome to nginx!” page.
Configure the default nginx Server Block
[Server Blocks are the nginx’s term for what an Apache webserver administrator would term “VirtualHosts”]
We will configure the following server block:
- nono.com
We make our user, cunnie, a member of the www group:
sudo vim /etc/group
We add our userid, cunnie, to the www group:
www:*:80:cunnie
We make sure we didn’t make any typos using chkgrp. If no errors, we check in our changes and push:
chkgrp &&
pushd /etc &&
sudo git add /etc/group &&
sudo -E git commit -m"cunnie a member of www" &&
sudo -E git push origin master &&
popd
Although we’ve added ourselves to the www group, the change does not take effect retroactively—we need to login out and log back in again [1] .
exit
ssh -A cunnie@shay.nono.com
We use the id command to ensure that we’re really a member of the www group:
id
uid=2000(cunnie) gid=2000(cunnie) groups=2000(cunnie),0(wheel),80(www)
We create a directory to host the content of our websites. We make the owner www, and we allow anyone in the www group to write to it:
sudo mkdir /www
sudo chown www:www /www
sudo chmod 775 /www
We copy the content from our original webserver using rsync:
rsync -aH --progress --stats --exclude Attic --exclude .git nono.com:/www/ /www/
We create a log directory [2] to hold the webserver logs. We also copy the logs from our original server (which date back to 9/8/2001):
sudo mkdir /var/www
sudo chgrp www /var/www
sudo chmod 775 /var/www
rsync -aH --progress --stats --exclude Attic --exclude .git nono.com:/var/www/*log /var/www/
We edit the nginx.conf:
sudo -E vim /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
We create a catch-all stanzas:
server {
server_name _; # invalid value which will never trigger on a real hostname.
access_log /var/www/nono.com-access.log;
root /www/nono.com;
}
[Note: the current nginx.conf can be viewed here]
We restart the nginx server for the new configuration to take effect:
sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/nginx restart
We browse to our machine to ensure it shows our content instead of the nginx splash screen: http://shay.nono.com.
We have successfully configured nginx under FreeBSD!
Bibliography
The nginx wiki has an excellent description of setting up Server Blocks
Digital Ocean has a post describing setting up Server Blocks on Ubuntu
Footnotes
1 There is a FreeBSD command, newgrp, which allows one to obtain newly-issued group credentials; however, the command requires additional configuration to work properly, (i.e. chmod u+s /usr/bin/newgrp), and the author decided that, in the interest of brevity, it is simpler to recommend logging out and in again.
2 We choose to place our logs under /var/www; admittedly, this is a somewhat arbitrary decision: FreeBSD conventionally places logs under /var/log; FreeBSD’s nginx’s compiled-in defaults (as seen by nginx -V) also place its access and error logs under /var/log. But we prefer our log files in their own directory to keep them separate from the other logs (e.g. syslog, cron). Even though we have decided to keep the log files in a special directory, we keep them under the /var directory where FreeBSD recommends that “multi-purpose log” (hier(7)) files be kept.
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