Installing NGINX on macOS

I have heard of a lot of NGINX recently. One of them was it can help for security issues; for sure, it much be more. It so happens that our team has got a ton of user stories from a security audit. It's time to delve into it.

What is NGINX?

In order to get a basic idea and have some fun, I've just picked some available posts from my favorite Vietnamese blogger communities as below:

• https://kipalog.com/posts/Cau-hinh-nginx-co-ban---Phan-1
• https://viblo.asia/hoang.thi.tuan.dung/posts/ZabG912QGzY6

NGINX (pronounce: Engine-X) is a web server (comparing to IIS, Apache). It can be used as a reverse proxy (this is what I need for security issues with configuration), load balancer and more.

How to get started?

I found the below path for learning NGINX by googling "learn nginx":

• https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-online-resources-to-learn-Nginx

In this post, I only went first step. This is installing NGINX on macOS and taking a first look at the configuration.

Installing

I used HomeBrew to install NGINX. If you are familiar with Ubuntu, HomeBrew is like an equivalent to apt-get on macOS.

Install HomeBrew

$ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Install NGINX

$brew install nginx

Run

$nginx

Test

http://localhost:8080/

Configuration

I still have no idea how to do configuration properly but I guess we need to modify something on some configurable files. The below might be an example. I'll keep trying hands-on in next steps.

$vim /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf