# Octopress and Nginx - Bigdinosaur Blog **URL:** \ **Category:** blog\ **Created:** [March 4, 2014, 1:59am UTC](https://cog.discourse.group/t/octopress-and-nginx-bigdinosaur-blog/673 "2014-03-04T01:59:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BigDinoBlog](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/cog.discourse.group/bigdinoblog/32/417_2.png) [@BigDinoBlog](https://cog.discourse.group/u/BigDinoBlog)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2014, 2:00am UTC](https://cog.discourse.group/t/octopress-and-nginx-bigdinosaur-blog/673/1 "2014-03-04T02:00:00Z")
Getting Octopress set up took a bit more time than I was expecting, because of the missing libraries issues I encountered. Fortunately, actually putting Octopress published and visible on the web took a lot less time. The Bigdinosaur.org web server runs the latest stable version of [Nginx](http://wiki.nginx.org), an event-driven web server which serves static pages faster than a fat kid eats pancakes. Nginx has a roughly similar concept of [virtual hosts](http://wiki.nginx.org/VirtualHostExample) as Apache does, and because Octopress doesn’t require any databases and doesn’t use PHP or perl, it can be served with a very simple site definition file. Most folks tend to be comfortable doing virtual hosts in the Apache way. If you install Nginx on Ubuntu from a repository (there is a [Launchpad PPA](http://wiki.nginx.org/Install#Ubuntu_PPA) with the latest stable release, which is several revisions newer than the one in the default sources), you’ll end up with an `/etc/nginx/sites-available` directory and an `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled` directory, with the former containing site definition files and the latter containing symlinks to those files, just like Apache. We’ll use those directories here. ### Configuration 1: HTTP only To do a site without HTTPS, we’ll need to create a single file: 1 $ sudo touch /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourblog.com Add the following inside that file: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourblog.com1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 server { ### This setting tells Nginx to use this configuration if it gets a request for ### yourblog.com server\_name yourblog.com; ### This is the location on the web server where your Octopress files are ### published. Setting this here means you don't have to set it for any of the ### individual locations you define below. root /var/www/yourblog.com; ### This tells Nginx to use "index.html" as the default index page everywhere index index.html; ### This disables automatic directory index creation, since no one will be ### browsing your directories anyway autoindex off; ### Here we define the root location... location / { ### ...and then work some magic with "try\_files", telling Nginx that for every ### request that comes in to /, it should first try to serve the URI exactly ### as it is, and if it doesn't find anything by that name to then try and ### serve the URI as a directory, and if it doesn't find a directory by that ### name to then spit out a 404 error and give up. try\_files $uri $uri/ =404; } ### This location definition prevents Nginx from serving any files which begin ### with a dot, and further to not log any access attempts or 404s for files ### which begin with dots, to keep your access and error logs clean. location ~ /\. { access\_log off; log\_not\_found off; deny all; } ### This location definition prevents Nginx from serving any files which begin ### with a dollar sign, so Nginx will refuse to serve out a temp file if you ### are doing any editing inside a web-available directory location ~ ~$ { access\_log off; log\_not\_found off; deny all; } ### These next two locations simply prevent Nginx from logging every time the ### favicon & robots.txt files are accessed, to keep the logs clean location = /robots.txt { access\_log off; log\_not\_found off; } location = /favicon.ico { access\_log off; log\_not\_found off; } } Easy! Then, enable the site by symlinking it into the sites-enabled directory and have Nginx re-parse its config files to make it live: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourblog.com1 2 $ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourblog.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourblog.com $ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload ### Configuration 2: HTTP and HTTPS But what if you’ve got some fancy-pants SSL/TLS certs that you want to use so that you can read your blog via an encrypted connection? This involves a slightly different way of configuring the server. Typical practice with Apache is to have one configuration file for an HTTP host and a separate config file for an HTTPS host, but with Nginx we can use one configuration file for both. Plus, to keep from having to type a bunch of stuff out twice and keep up with it twice, we’ll put the configuration directives and locations that both servers share into a separate file and tell Nginx to parse that, too. This time, we’ll need two files created: 1 2 $ sudo touch /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourblog.com $ sudo touch /etc/nginx/common.conf In the site definition file, add the following: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourblog.com1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 ### The first server block is the HTTP server server { server\_name yourblog.com; root /var/www/yourblog.com; index index.html; autoindex off; ### And now, rather than list a bunch of locations here, we just tell Nginx to ### go find the "common.conf" file and read that instead. We're going to add ### stuff into common.conf in just a sec. include common.conf; } ### The second server block is the HTTPS server, which has the "listen 443" ### line to tell Nginx that traffic for it will come on TCP port 443. The ### HTTP server above doesn't have a "listen 80" line because when the "listen" ### directive is omitted, "listen 80" is implied. server { server\_name yourblog.com; root /var/www/yourblog.com; listen 443; root /var/www-blog; index index.html; autoindex off; include common.conf; ### The next set of directives tells Nginx that this server uses SSL, and then ### supplies it with the configuration settings necessary to make SSL work ssl on; ssl\_certificate /path/to/your/ssl/certificate.crt; ssl\_certificate\_key /path/to/your/ssl/privatekey.pem; ssl\_session\_timeout 5m; ssl\_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl\_ciphers ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv3:+EXP:!kEDH; ssl\_prefer\_server\_ciphers on; } Note the ssl\_ciphers line excludes the extremely secure but extremely DSE-RSA-AES256-SHA algorithm (that’s the `!kEDH` on the end of the line), which will speed up SSL/TLS connection speed by quite a bit, but at the cost of some encryption strength. For a bit more on why I’ve added this here, see [this page over on the blags of matt](http://matt.io/entry/ur). Note also that Nginx doesn’t support separate certificate chain files—you will need to concatenate your server certificate and whatever upstream certificates needed into a single chained certificate file and use that. Next, add this into the common.conf file: /etc/nginx/common.conf1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 ### This file contains common configuration and location directives for the ### HTTP and HTTPS versions of my Octopress blog ### Common root location location / { try\_files $uri $uri/ =404; } ### Common deny, drop, or internal locations location ~ /\. { access\_log off; log\_not\_found off; deny all; } location ~ ~$ { access\_log off; log\_not\_found off; deny all; } location = /robots.txt { access\_log off; log\_not\_found off; } location = /favicon.ico { access\_log off; log\_not\_found off; } Then, just like above, symlink that puppy in and have Nginx read it. 1 2 $ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourblog.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourblog.com $ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload And then, you are officially on-line! I’ll do a follow-up post this evening or tomorrow on [custom error pages](http://blog.bigdinosaur.org/custom-error-pages/), which are also fun. * * * Discussion topic for the original blog entry at: [http://blog.bigdinosaur.org//octopress-and-nginx](http://blog.bigdinosaur.org//octopress-and-nginx)