# How To Install Nginx on CentOS 7

By

Charl Cronje

To add the CentOS 7 EPEL repository, open terminal and use the following command:

sudo yum install epel-release

Now that the Nginx repository is installed on your server, install Nginx using the following yum command:

sudo yum install nginx

After you answer yes to the prompt, Nginx will finish installing on your virtual private server (VPS).

Nginx does not start on its own. To get Nginx running, type:

sudo systemctl start nginx

However I got the following error: Unregistered Authentication Agent for unix-process:11220:2470754

This seems to be an SELinux Issue, and since I don't have a read need for SELinux, I will just disable is: Disable SELinux

But that did not fix the problem either, so in the end it was because both NginX and Apache wants to use Port 80 and Apache was already using it. For now I'm leaving this as is, I will figure out later how to run both at the same time or I will set NginX to listen on a different port

If you are running a firewall, run the following commands to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http 
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

You can do a spot check right away to verify that everything went as planned by visiting your server’s public IP address in your web browser (see the note under the next heading to find out what your public IP address is if you do not have this information already):

http://server_domain_name_or_IP/ You will see the default CentOS 7 Nginx web page, which is there for informational and testing purposes. It should look something like this:

If you see this page, then your web server is now correctly installed.

Before continuing, you will probably want to enable Nginx to start when your system boots. To do so, enter the following command:

sudo systemctl enable nginx

To find your server’s public IP address, find the network interfaces on your machine by typing:

ip addr

1. lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN

. . .
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000

. . .

You may see a number of interfaces here depending on the hardware available on your server. The lo interface is the local loopback interface, which is not the one we want. In our example above, the eth0 interface is what we want.

Once you have the interface name, you can run the following command to reveal your server’s public IP address. Substitute the interface name you found above:

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

If you want to start serving your own pages or application through Nginx, you will want to know the locations of the Nginx configuration files and default server root directory.

The default server root directory is /usr/share/nginx/html. Files that are placed in there will be served on your web server. This location is specified in the default server block configuration file that ships with Nginx, which is located at /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.

Any additional server blocks, known as Virtual Hosts in Apache, can be added by creating new configuration files in /etc/nginx/conf.d. Files that end with .conf in that directory will be loaded when Nginx is started.

The main Nginx configuration file is located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. This is where you can change settings like the user that runs the Nginx daemon processes, and the number of worker processes that get spawned when Nginx is running, among other things.