How to Troubleshoot Common Nginx Issues on Linux Server?

Question

I have been seeing this question quite a lot recently, so I decided to put together a few steps on what to do in case your website is not loading.

If you are using Apache you could follow these steps here instead:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-troubleshoot-common-apache-issues-on-linux-server

Bobby · Accepted Answer

I would recommend following these steps in case that you are having any problems with your nginx server and you are unsure on what the problem is: Check if nginx is running: systemctl status nginx If nginx is running you should see something like this: ● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP Server Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-11-19 09:37:46 UTC; 2 days ago Docs: https://httpd.nginx.org/docs/2.4/ If nginx is not running then the output would look like this: ● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP Server Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: inactive (dead) since Fri 2019-11-22 08:41:01 UTC; 39s ago Docs: https://httpd.nginx.org/docs/2.4/ If nginx is not running you could start it with: systemctl start nginx Then check the status agian and make sure that nginx remains running. If nginx did not start after a reboot, you could enable it so that it starts after the next reboot: systemctl enable nginx Check your nginx config syntax: nginx -t If you get an error, you would need to fix that problem and then you could restart nginx: systemctl restart nginx If you get Syntax OK when running nginx -t then your confiruation is correct, so I would recommend checking your error logs: tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log Check the permissions of the files and folders in your document root: Find the user that your nginx service is running as: ps auxf | grep nginx If you are using Ubuntu, the user should be www-data, so you would need to make sure that your files and folders are owned by that user, so nginx could read and write to those files: chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/yourdomain.com Check if nginx is binding to the default ports: netstat -plant | grep '80\|443' Check if ufw allows TCP connections on port 80 and 443: ufw status If this is the case, you can follow the steps from this article here on how to configure your ufw: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-ubuntu-18-04 That is pretty much it, with all of the above information you should be able to narrow down the problem. For more information I would suggest checking out this article here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-troubleshoot-common-site-issues-on-a-linux-server Here is also a quick video demo on how to do that: Hope that this helps!Regards,Bobby

Become a contributor for community

DigitalOcean Documentation

Resources for startups and AI-native businesses

The developer cloud

Start building today

Report this

How to Troubleshoot Common Nginx Issues on Linux Server?

Related questions

How can I improve the speed of an e-commerce website?

How to optimize Nginx reverse proxy caching for media streaming apps?

How to configure Nginx reverse proxy on Ubuntu

How to fix in nginx security config

How to change existing certbot/nginx to wildcard domain?

How do I get Ruby with Hanami to serve dynamic files via Falcon?

Unable to access the URL after deploying Discourse

AstroJS project hosted on DigitalOcean droplet with Nginx – CSS loading as text/html

Setting up a reverse proxy on DigitalOcean App Platform to route main domain and subdomains

using shiny-server with nginx

Django/Nginx/Gunicorn "unknown errors" in nginx logs

Problem running multiple workers with gunicorn/nginx to deploy python/flask web app

Report this

How to Troubleshoot Common Nginx Issues on Linux Server?

Related questions

How can I improve the speed of an e-commerce website?

How to optimize Nginx reverse proxy caching for media streaming apps?

How to configure Nginx reverse proxy on Ubuntu

How to fix in nginx security config

How to change existing certbot/nginx to wildcard domain?

How do I get Ruby with Hanami to serve dynamic files via Falcon?

Unable to access the URL after deploying Discourse

AstroJS project hosted on DigitalOcean droplet with Nginx – CSS loading as text/html

Setting up a reverse proxy on DigitalOcean App Platform to route main domain and subdomains

using shiny-server with nginx

Django/Nginx/Gunicorn "unknown errors" in nginx logs

Problem running multiple workers with gunicorn/nginx to deploy python/flask web app