{"id":523,"date":"2016-11-13T23:56:31","date_gmt":"2016-11-13T15:56:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/?p=523"},"modified":"2018-09-05T00:13:16","modified_gmt":"2018-09-04T16:13:16","slug":"setting-up-nginx-server-on-windows-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/setting-up-nginx-server-on-windows-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting up Nginx server on Windows 10"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I got my wife an Asus ROG 15-Inch Gaming laptop<\/a> as a development machine (so that I can have a machine to use when I feel like gaming). Since the Nginx server<\/a> is one of my favorite servers for building web applications, it is something that I will always setup first when I get a new development machine. <\/p>\n

I will set up my Nginx server to listen on port 80 and serve as a reverse proxy to web applications listening on other port numbers. And since the ROG GL552VW-DH74 15-Inch Gaming laptop<\/a> came with Windows 10, this post documents the steps that I went through to set up Nginx server on Windows 10.<\/p>\n

Downloading a copy of Nginx<\/h2>\n

The first thing that I did was to download a copy of Nginx for Windows. To do so, I go to the Nginx download page<\/a> and click on the link labelled as nginx\/WindowsXXX<\/strong> located under the section named Stable version<\/strong>. As of this writing, I downloaded nginx\/Windows-1.10.2<\/a> and unzipped the contents to D:\\servers<\/code>. This will create the folder D:\\servers\\nginx-1.10.2<\/code> which contains everything that is needed for me to run Nginx on Windows 10.<\/p>\n

Starting Nginx for the first time<\/h2>\n

To test whether the copy of Nginx that I had downloaded is working, I opened up command prompt and typed the following commands:<\/p>\n

\r\ncd \/d D:\\servers\\nginx-1.10.2\r\nnginx\r\n<\/pre>\n
Running the above commands triggered the following dialog box:<\/p>\n
\"Windows<\/p>\n
I clicked on the Allow Access<\/strong> button to get my Windows 10 firewall to associate port 80 to my Nginx server. I then opened up my browser and type localhost<\/strong> in the location bar and saw the following message:<\/p>\n
\"Nginx <\/p>\n
Stopping Nginx server<\/h2>\n
Once I had ensured that my Nginx server is able to run in my Windows 10 machine, I opened up another command prompt and typed the following commands to stop the Nginx server:<\/p>\n
\r\ncd \/d D:\\servers\\nginx-1.10.2\r\nnginx -s stop\r\n<\/pre>\n
Setting up Nginx server to start automatically when Windows 10 starts<\/h2>\n
Having to open up the command prompt to start Nginx every time I do my development work is cumbersome. Hence, I proceeded to set up my Nginx server to start automatically whenever my Windows 10 starts. Since the Nginx binary is not a windows service executable, I set it up to start automatically via the common Startup folder.<\/p>\n
To do so, I created a shortcut of the nginx.exe<\/code> binary and copied it to C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Start Menu\\Programs\\StartUp<\/code>. This will ensure that my Nginx server starts automatically whenever I log into my Windows 10 machine.<\/p>\n
Restarting Nginx server<\/h2>\n
To restart my Nginx server on my Windows 10, I open up my Windows prompt and type the following commands:<\/p>\n
\r\ncd \/d D:\\servers\\nginx-1.10.2\r\nnginx -s stop\r\nnginx \r\n<\/pre>\n
For convenience, I created a .bat<\/code> file that contains the above commands on the desktop so that I can quickly restart my Nginx server when I need to do so in the future.<\/p>\n\n