How to Set Up Nginx Server Blocks on Debian 10

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How to Set Up Nginx Server Blocks on Debian 10

A server block is an Nginx directive that defines settings for a specific domain, allowing you to run more than one website on a single server. For each website, you can set the site document root (the directory which contains the website files), create a separate security policy, use different SSL certificates, and much more.

This article explains how to set up Nginx server blocks on Debian 10.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you have met the following prerequisites:

In some documentation, the term Server Blocks is referred to as a Virtual host. A virtual host is an Apache term.

Create the Directory Structure

The document root is the directory where the website files for a domain name are stored and served in response to requests. The document root can be any directory on the server.

The examples in this article use the following directory structure:

/var/www/
├── domain1.com
│   └── public_html
├── domain2.com
│   └── public_html
├── domain3.com
│   └── public_html

Basically, we will create a separate directory for each domain we want to host on our server inside the /var/www directory. Within each of these directories, we will create a public_html directory that will store the domain website files.

Run the following command to create the root directory for the domain example.com:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/public_html

Next, create an index.html file inside the domain’s document root directory:

sudo nano /var/www/example.com/public_html/index.html

Open the file and paste the following lines:

/var/www/example.com/public_html/index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Welcome to example.com</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success! example.com home page!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

To avoid permission issues change the ownership of the domain document root directory to the Nginx user (www-data):

sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/example.com

Create a Server Block

By default, on Debian systems, Nginx server blocks configuration files are stored in /etc/nginx/sites-available directory. To activate a configuration you need to symlink the file to the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ directory.

Open your text editor and create the following server block file:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf
/etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf
server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    root /var/www/example.com/public_html;

    index index.html;

    server_name example.com www.example.com;

     access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;
     error_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.error.log;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

The configuration file can be named anything you want, but usually, it is best to use the domain name.

Enable the new server block file by creating a symbolic link from the file to the sites-enabled directory:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Test the Nginx configuration for correct syntax:

sudo nginx -t

If there are no errors, the output will look like this:

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Restart the Nginx service for the changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

To verify that the server block is working as expected, open http://example.com in your browser, and you will see something like this:

Conclusion

We have shown you how to create Nginx server blocks and host multiple domains on a single Debian server. To create a server block for another domain, repeat the same steps.

If you want to secure your website with an SSL certificate, you can generate and install a free Letsencrypt SSL certificate .

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

This post is a part of the How to Install LEMP Stack on Debian 10 series.
Other posts in this series:

nginxdebian