Have a glance of Nginx default configuration file

The first place we need to visit after the installation should be the nginx.conf file. This file contains everything we need for rendering a very basic static HTML web page on HTTP port 80.

Locate it through the main process

If you have started your Nginx process after the installation then we can get its configuration file through the master process:

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ps -ef | grep nginx

The result should look like:

Output the configuration to the screen

We See the nginx.conf File’s Location As shown in the picture above, the complete path for nginx.conf is /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, so let’s print that content to console by using cat command:

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cat /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Your result may differ from mine since I only pasted the executable code snippets:

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user  nginx;
worker_processes  1;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log  warn;
pid           /var/run.nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include          /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log   /var/log/nginx/access.log   main;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }
    }
}

Purpose of each instruction

Summary

I'm just going to make a brief and practical description of these instructions:

user

The default user Nginx uses at run time is nginx, we usually don’t change this value. If you want Nginx to be able to access a directory, then you need to set the ownership of that directory to nginx.

Contents

Have a glance of Nginx default configuration file

Locate it through the main process

Nginx Process

Output the configuration to the screen

Purpose of each instruction