Installing NGINX Plus

Introduction

NGINX Plus is supported on Amazon Linux, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Ubuntu.

For Sizing guidance for Deploying NGINX Plus, see Sizing Guide for Deploying NGINX Plus on Bare Metal Servers

Prerequisites

An NGINX Plus subscription (purchased or trial)
A supported operating system
root privilege
Your credentials to the NGINX Plus Customer Portal, provided by email from NGINX, Inc.
Your NGINX Plus certificate and public key (nginx-repo.crt and nginx-repo.key files), provided by email from NGINX, Inc.

References:

Installing NGINX Plus
GeoIP2 Module

Learning Objectives

By the end of the lab you will be able to:

Install NGINX Plus
Install a NGINX Plus Dynamic Module
Verify Installation
Invoke NGINX and common options from from the command line

Exercise 1: Install NGINX Plus

In the WORKSPACE folder found on the desktop, open NGINX-PLUS-3.code-workspace in Visual Studio Code (VSCode)

If are prompted Are you sure you want to continue?, select continue
In the VSCode, open a a terminal window, using View > Terminal menu command. You will now be able to both run NGINX commands and edit NGINX Plus configuration files via the VSCode Console and terminal. (SSH access via Putty is also available as a SSH remote terminal access option.)

In the terminal run the following commands to install NGINX Plus

# Confirm you are root
$> whoami
root

# Move to the /root directory and check nginx-repo cert and key are here
$> cd /root 
$> ls
nginx-repo.crt  nginx-repo.key

# Run installation commands
$> mkdir -p /etc/ssl/nginx 
$> cp nginx-repo.* /etc/ssl/nginx
$> apt-get -y install apt-transport-https lsb-release ca-certificates wget gnupg2 ubuntu-keyring 
$> wget -qO - https://cs.nginx.com/static/keys/nginx_signing.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/nginx-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null 
$> printf "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nginx-archive-keyring.gpg] https://pkgs.nginx.com/plus/ubuntu `lsb_release -cs` nginx-plus\n" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nginx-plus.list
$> wget -P /etc/apt/apt.conf.d https://cs.nginx.com/static/files/90pkgs-nginx
$> apt-get update 
$> apt-get -y install nginx-plus

Verify the version of NGINX Plus that was installed:

$> nginx -v 
nginx version: nginx/1.23.4 (nginx-plus-r29-p1)

Install the NGINX Plus GeoIP2 Dynamic Module

$> apt-get -y install nginx-plus-module-geoip2 

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done

The following additional packages will be installed:
libmaxminddb0
Suggested packages:
mmdb-bin

The following NEW packages will be installed:
libmaxminddb0 nginx-plus-module-geoip2

0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 230 not upgraded.
Need to get 37.7 kB of archives.
After this operation, 139 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://us-west-2.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe amd64 libmaxminddb0 amd64 1.3.1-1 [25.6 kB]
Get:2 https://pkgs.nginx.com/plus/ubuntu bionic/nginx-plus amd64 nginx-plus-module-geoip2 amd64 29+3.4-1~bionic [12.1 kB]
Fetched 37.7 kB in 1s (61.3 kB/s)              
Selecting previously unselected package libmaxminddb0:amd64.
(Reading database ... 56728 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libmaxminddb0_1.3.1-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libmaxminddb0:amd64 (1.3.1-1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package nginx-plus-module-geoip2.
Preparing to unpack .../nginx-plus-module-geoip2_29+3.4-1~bionic_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking nginx-plus-module-geoip2 (29+3.4-1~bionic) ...
Setting up libmaxminddb0:amd64 (1.3.1-1) ...
Setting up nginx-plus-module-geoip2 (29+3.4-1~bionic) ...

Notice in the end of the output the instructions to enable the module via the NGINX config. We will do this later:

The 3rd-party GeoIP2 dynamic modules for NGINX Plus have been installed. 
To enable these modules, add the following to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf 
and reload nginx: 

   load_module modules/ngx_http_geoip2_module.so; 
   load_module modules/ngx_stream_geoip2_module.so; 

Please refer to the module documentation for further details: 
https://github.com/leev/ngx_http_geoip2_module 

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.3-2ubuntu0.1) ... 
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.27-3ubuntu1) ...

Start NGINX Plus
```
$> systemctl start nginx 
```

Verify that NGINX Plus has started

$> ps -eaf | grep nginx 

root      5532     1  0 19:35 ?        00:00:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf 
nginx     5534  5532  0 19:35 ?        00:00:00 nginx: worker process 
root      5541  4062  0 19:35 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto nginx

Test the NGINX Plus instance in your browser. Open Google Chrome from your Desktop and enter the following URL, http://nginx-plus-3. You should see the NGINX default page:

Exercise 2: NGINX Plus command line basics

In this exercise, we will review configure NGINX Plus as a basic load balancer and test/verify configured functionality.

If you have closed VSCode, once again, open NGINX-PLUS-3code-workspace found in the he WORKSPACE folder, on the desktop, in VSCode
In the VSCode, open a a terminal window, using View > Terminal menu command. You will now be able to both run NGINX commands and edit NGINX Plus configuration files via the VSCode Console and terminal. (SSH access via Putty is also available as a SSH remote terminal access option.)

In the terminal try running the following NGINX commands and inspect the output (output won't be listed in below):

#  Print help for command-line parameters.
$> nginx -h 
# Test the configuration file: nginx checks the configuration for correct syntax, 
# and then tries to open files referred in the configuration.
$> nginx -t 
# same as -t, but additionally dump configuration files to standard output
$> nginx -T 
# print nginx version
$> nginx -v
# print nginx version, compiler version, and configure parameters.
$> nginx -V 
# send a signal to the master process. The argument signal can be one of:
# stop — shut down quickly
# quit — shut down gracefully
# reload — reload configuration, start the new worker process with a new
#          configuration, gracefully shut down old worker processes.
# reopen — reopen log files
$> nginx -s reload

Exercise 3: Inspect NGINX Plus modules

Now at NGINX Plus is installed, browse to the NGINX configuration root, /etc/nginx

File > Open Folder...
Enter /etc/nginx in the open folder menu
Select the nginx.conf file in the VSCode Explorer section.
To enable the 3rd-party GeoIP2 dynamic modules for NGINX Plus that have been installed, add the following lines to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf in the main context and reload nginx:
```
# load modules
load_module modules/ngx_http_geoip2_module.so; 
load_module modules/ngx_stream_geoip2_module.so;
```
For example, it may look like this:
In the terminal window using View > Terminal menu command, and in the terminal, run the following commands to reload nginx:
```
$> nginx -t && nginx -s reload
```
See which Dynamic modules are installed:
```
$> cd /etc/nginx/modules  
$> ls -al 
```

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installing_nginx_plus.md

installing_nginx_plus.md

Installing NGINX Plus

Introduction

Learning Objectives

Exercise 1: Install NGINX Plus

Exercise 2: NGINX Plus command line basics

Exercise 3: Inspect NGINX Plus modules

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installing_nginx_plus.md

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Installing NGINX Plus

Introduction

Learning Objectives

Exercise 1: Install NGINX Plus

Exercise 2: NGINX Plus command line basics

Exercise 3: Inspect NGINX Plus modules