How to Install Latest Nginx Mainline on Rocky Linux 8

Nginx is a free, open-source software solution for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. Compared to Apache, Nginx is a high‑performance, highly scalable, and highly available web server. Thanks to its ability to handle massive numbers of connections, it is the preferred web server of many websites that deal with high traffic.

By default, the latest Nginx mainline version is not included in the Rocky Linux Appresteam repository. For a production environment, it is always recommended to install the latest version.

In this post, we will show you how to install the latest Nginx Mainline on Rocky Linux 8.

Step 1 – Add an Nginx Repository

First, install the dnf-utils package using the following command:

dnf install dnf-utils -y

Next, create an Nginx repo with the following command:

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo

Add the following lines:

[nginx-stable]
name=nginx stable repo
baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/centos/$releasever/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=https://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
module_hotfixes=true

[nginx-mainline]
name=nginx mainline repo
baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/mainline/centos/$releasever/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=https://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
module_hotfixes=true

Save and close the file, then enable the Nginx Mainline repo using the following command:

yum-config-manager --enable nginx-mainline

Step 2 – Install Nginx Mainline on Rocky Linux 8

Now, run the following command to install the latest Nginx Mainline package to your server.

dnf install nginx

You should see the following output:

nginx stable repo                                                                                               48 kB/s |  32 kB     00:00    
nginx mainline repo                                                                                            111 kB/s |  86 kB     00:00    
Dependencies resolved.
===============================================================================================================================================
 Package                     Architecture                 Version                                   Repository                            Size
===============================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 nginx                       x86_64                       1:1.21.3-1.el8.ngx                        nginx-mainline                       823 k

Transaction Summary
===============================================================================================================================================
Install  1 Package

Total download size: 823 k
Installed size: 2.8 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y

Once Nginx is installed, start the Nginx service and enable it to start at system reboot:

systemctl start nginx
systemctl enable nginx

Next, verify the status of Nginx with the following command:

systemctl status nginx

You should get the following output:

● nginx.service - nginx - high performance web server
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Fri 2021-10-29 14:01:05 UTC; 14s ago
     Docs: http://nginx.org/en/docs/
  Process: 4996 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 4997 (nginx)
    Tasks: 2 (limit: 11411)
   Memory: 1.9M
   CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service
           ├─4997 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
           └─4998 nginx: worker process

Oct 29 14:01:05 RockyLinux8 systemd[1]: Starting nginx - high performance web server...
Oct 29 14:01:05 RockyLinux8 systemd[1]: nginx.service: Can't open PID file /var/run/nginx.pid (yet?) after start: No such file or directory
Oct 29 14:01:05 RockyLinux8 systemd[1]: Started nginx - high performance web server.

Now, verify the Nginx version using the following command:

nginx -v

You should see the Nginx version in the following output:

nginx version: nginx/1.21.3

Step 3 – Configure Firewall

By default, Nginx listens on ports 80 and 443. If any firewall is installed and configured on your server, then you will need to allow both ports via firewalld. You can allow them with the following command:

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

Next, reload firewalld to apply the changes:

firewall-cmd --reload

Step 4 – Access Nginx Default Page

Now, open your web browser and access the Nginx default page using the URL http://your-server-ip. You should see the Nginx default page on the following screen:

Conclusion

In the above post, we explained how to install the latest Nginx mainline version to Rocky Linux 8. You can now easily update your current Nginx version to the latest version; try it on VPS hosting from Atlantic.Net!