Testing your server

At this point, you have configured several basic directives that affect the core functioning of Nginx. We will perform a simple test to ensure that all is working as expected, and that you are ready to further configure and deploy your websites.

Creating a test server

In order to perform simple tests, such as connecting to the server with a web browser, we need to set up a website for Nginx to serve. A test page comes with the default package in the html folder (/usr/local/nginx/html/index.html) and the original nginx.conf is configured to serve this page. Here is the section that we are interested in for now:

http { 
    include       mime.types; 
    default_type  application/octet-stream; 
    sendfile        on; 
    keepalive_timeout  65; 
    server { 
        listen       80; 
        server_name  localhost; 
        location / { 
            root   html; 
            index  index.html index.htm; 
        } 
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html; 
     ...