Tutorial

How To Set Up nginx Virtual Hosts (Server Blocks) on CentOS 6

Published on June 8, 2012

How To Set Up nginx Virtual Hosts (Server Blocks) on CentOS 6

Status: Deprecated

This article covers a version of CentOS that is no longer supported. If you are currently operating a server running CentOS 6, we highly recommend upgrading or migrating to a supported version of CentOS.

Reason: CentOS 6 reached end of life (EOL) on November 30th, 2020 and no longer receives security patches or updates. For this reason, this guide is no longer maintained.

See Instead:
This guide might still be useful as a reference, but may not work on other CentOS releases. If available, we strongly recommend using a guide written for the version of CentOS you are using.

The following DigitalOcean tutorial may be of interset, as it outlines setting up Nginx Server Blocks on a CentOS 7 server:

How To Set Up Nginx Server Blocks on CentOS 7

About Virtual Hosts

Virtual Hosts are used to run more than one website or domain off of a single virtual private server.Note: according to the nginx website, Virtual Hosts are called Server Blocks on nginx. However, for the sake of easy comparison with Apache, I'll refer to them as virtual hosts throughout this tutorial.

Intro

Make sure that nginx is installed on your VPS. If it is not, you can quickly install it with 2 steps.

Install the EPEL repository:

 su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm'

Install nginx

yum install nginx

Step One— Create a New Directory

The first step in creating a virtual host is to a create a directory where we will keep the new website’s information.

This location will be your Document Root in the Nginx virtual configuration file later on. By adding a -p to the line of code, the command automatically generates all the parents for the new directory.

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

You will need to designate an actual DNS approved domain, or an IP address, to test that a virtual host is working. In this tutorial we will use example.com as a placeholder for a correct domain name.

However, should you want to use an unapproved domain name to test the process you will find information on how to make it work on your local computer in Step Six.

Step Two—Grant Permissions

We need to grant ownership of the directory to the right user, instead of just keeping it on the root system. You can replace the "www" below with the appropriate username.

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

Additionally, it is important to make sure that everyone is able to read our new files.

sudo chmod 755 /var/www

Now you are all done with permissions.

Step Three— Create the Page

We need to create a new file called index.html within the directory we made earlier.

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

We can add some text to the file so we will have something to look at when the the site redirects to the virtual host.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>www.example.com</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success: You Have Set Up a Virtual Host</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Save and Exit

Step Four—Set Up the Virtual Host

The next step is to enter into the nginx configuration file itself.

sudo vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf

The virtual host file is already almost completely set up on your virtual server. To finish up, simply match the following configuration, modifying the server name and file location as needed:

#
# A virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration
#

server {
    listen       80;
#    listen       *:80;
    server_name  example.com;

    location / {
        root   /var/www/example.com/public_html/;
         index  index.html index.htm;
    }
}

Save and exit.

Step Five—Restart nginx

We’ve made a lot of the changes to the configuration. Restart nginx and make the changes visible.

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

Optional Step Six—Setting Up the Local Hosts

If you have been using an actual domain or IP address to test your virtual servers, you do not need to set up local hosts. However, if you are using a generic domain that you do not own, this will guarantee that, on your computer only, you will be able to customize it.

For this step, make sure you are on the computer itself, not your VPS.

To proceed with this step you need to know your computer’s administrative password, otherwise you will be required to use an actual domain name or your IP address to test the virtual hosts.

Assuming that you do have admin access (gained by typing su and entering the correct password) here is how you can set up the local hosts.

On your local computer, type:

nano /etc/hosts

You can add the local hosts' details to this file, as seen in the example below. As long as line with the IP address and server name is there, directing your browser toward, say, example.com will give you all the virtual host details for the corresponding IP address that you designated.

# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1       localhost

#Virtual Hosts 
12.34.56.789    www.example.com

However, it may be a good idea to delete these made up addresses out of the local hosts folder when you are done to avoid any future confusion.

Step Seven—See Your Virtual Host in Action

Once you have finished setting up your virtual host, you can see how it looks online. Point your browser to your domain name or IP address, and you should see that the page displays, "Success—You Have Set Up a Virtual Host"

Adding More Virtual Hosts

To create additional virtual hosts, you can just repeat the process above, being careful to set up a new document root with the appropriate new domain name each time. Then just copy and paste the new Virtual Host information into the nginx Config file, as shown below

#
# A virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration
#

server {
    listen       80;
#    listen       *:80;
    server_name  example.com;

    location / {
        root   /var/www/example.com/public_html/;
         index  index.html index.htm;
    }
}


server {
    listen       80;
#    listen       *:80;
    server_name  example.org;

    location / {
        root   /var/www/example.org/public_html/;
         index  index.html index.htm;
    }
}

By Etel Sverdlov

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Etel Sverdlov

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digitalocean25755 • December 16, 2012

I’ve just finished setting up a droplet using your: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-linux-nginx-mysql-php-lemp-stack-on-centos-6 (which I copy/pasted my way through without issue).

I have just ran through this guide too on setting up a virtual host. When I tried to access a .php file though, the browser tried to download the content. I assumed the .php config in the /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf would have handled it. Instead for my virtual host I am using:

server { listen 80; server_name www.example.com example.com; root /var/www/example.com/public_html/; index index.php index.html index.htm;

try_files    $uri /index.php;

location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME   $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
}

}

The try_files is to push all non-file requests - example.com/some/path/some/var - to the index.php file for typical MVC framework.

Moisey Uretsky

DigitalOcean Employee

• December 17, 2012

If the browser tried to download the PHP file that means that you do not have an interpreter running.

Please make sure that you ran:

sudo service php-fpm restart

Or as root:

service php-fpm restart

This will then run php-fpm which is what nginx will proxy to, to process php scripts.

sario120 • April 18, 2013

I tried these configurations, very nice and working all these up to 6th step. but when i tried for virtual hosting, it doesn’t working, I gave them entry in /etc/hosts as ip nginx.com and I changed thier root directories… Why is this no working? Please help

azaliajogja • May 6, 2013

i’ve try the virtual hosts server blocks and it’s success. but when i try to adding more website/multiple site on the virtual.conf, i only get succes for the first site. other site cannot rearch server. i have dig the website and it’s success only for the first site. below is my virtual.conf

A virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration

server { listen 80;

listen *:80;

server_name  mfaridlutfi.com;

location / {
    root   /var/www/mfaridlutfi.com/public_html/;
 index index.php index.html index.htm;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}
    error_page  404              /404.html;
location = /404.html {
    root   /var/www/mfaridlutfi.com/public_html/;
}

error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
    root   /var/www/mfaridlutfi.com/public_html/;
}
 # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000

    location ~ \.php$ {
    root           /var/www/mfaridlutfi.com/public_html/;
    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME   $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
   deny  all;
}

}

server { listen 80;

listen *:80;

server_name designev.com;

location / {
    root   /var/www/designev.com/public_html/;
     index  index.php index.html index.htm;
	 try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}

}

server { listen 80;

listen *:80;

server_name  smartphonereviewers.com;

location / {
    root   /var/www/smartphonereviewers.com/public_html/;
     index  index.php index.html index.htm;
	 try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}

}

the mfaridlutfi.com is success loading, the designev.com and smartphonereviewers cannot reach the server. any help ? thanks

Kamal Nasser

DigitalOcean Employee

• May 6, 2013

@M. Farid lutfi: The websites are loading fine for me. It could be DNS propagation that took a long time.

droidlabour • August 3, 2013

In case of virtual hosting, the server_name directive must contain both example.com and www.example.com if any of them are omitted then nginx will redirect the missing url request to the default server_name. Example: server { … … server_name defaultwebsite.com … … } server { … … server_name example.com; … … } In this case if you request for www.example.com then nginx will redirect you to the default server name ie defaultwebsite.com It doesn’t matter even if you setup the CNAME record for www.example.com to example.com

The correct form must be server_name example.com www.example.com

rogerpack2005 • August 3, 2013

yes suggest you update this to have server_name also include www…

Harsh Baid • September 1, 2013

This tutorial is currently not working! I tried this and when i go on to my website. It just downloads the index.php file? Any help???

Kamal Nasser

DigitalOcean Employee

• September 1, 2013

@Harsh: This article doesn’t configure nginx to work with php. Do you have php-fpm installed?

Install it if you do not and add this block to your nginx virtualhost config: <a href=“https://p.kk7.me/rowumehile.nginx”>https://p.kk7.me/rowumehile.nginx</a>

romelverterra • October 13, 2013

Same problem here, I do everything in this tutorial on the droplet I created but it just do the download instead of processing php file. I try service php-fpm restart and it is reports okay but still no success.