Linux workshop showing you how to setup Ubuntu in VMware and set up NGINX.

Table of Contents

1. Why linux
2. Virtual Machine
3. Getting ready
   1. VMware
   2. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
4. Setting Up VMware
5. Setting up Ubuntu
6. Setting up Nginx
7. Getting your own site onto NGINX

Why linux

• Ubunutu like distro
  • Ubuntu easy to use
    • Free
    • Easy to use
    • Lots of support
• Why is linux a good choice for servers
  • Free and Open Source (FOSS)
  • Flexible
    • You can install only the software you need
    • Has lots of software that can be used to run a webserver
      • Apache
      • NGNIX
    • Security
      • Because Linux is open source, it can be independanty audited for exploits and valunerabilities, and has a large community that can fix any issues that are found

Virtual Machine

• VM ware is Virtual Machine Software
  • we can run a mini computer in the virtual box
  • This computer has a lot of the functionality of a real computer
  • We can also
    • Quickly destroy a Virtual Machine
    • Restore a virtual machine to an earlier point
    • Run multiple Virtual Machines at the same time
  • Because of these reasons, virtual machines are used for running servers, with a good enough machine running hundres of machines at once

Getting ready

• Before we do the workshop you will need to do two things

VMware

• If you are using an x86 system (windows or intel mac) You can download VMware from here
• if you are using Linux you can get vmware from the package vmware-workstation using your package manager

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

• For this workshop we will be using Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 LTS, however instructions should be the same for any other Ubuntu based Linux distro
• You can download the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS iso from here

Setting Up VMware

• When you first setup VMware, this screen will show up
• Luckily we are not going to be using VMWare for long so just select I want to try VMWare for 30 days and you’ll see this screen

• From here we can start our own virtual machine

• Click on create new Virtual Machine and Typical configuration

• Select the Ubuntu ISO we downloaded

• Enter in details to login to the machine, for the sake of demonstration I’m going with isaactpc, feel free to use any username and password you can remember

• If you have the space go with the default capacity, please let me know if you do not have the disk space

• Confirm your configuration and we can finish the final steps to setup the virtual machine

• VMWare will start the machine and you should see this screen

• Eventually a UI will show up and let us know that Ubuntu is configuring for this hardware

• After its finished setting up in VMWare, the virutal machine will restart and open into:

Setting up Ubuntu

• For the sake of clarity, I am going to turn the resolution up from 480p so we can see what is going on

• Now that we’re in Ubuntu, lets do a little test to make sure that Networking is working on our VMWare instance
• Open up Firefox (which is included with Ubuntu) and open up http://www.google.com, if you see this screen it means that we are connected to the internet

• Now select the button at the top of the screen that says Activities, and search for teminal.
• A terminal Window should now show up on the screen like so:
• To make sure the system is up-to-date, we have to run

  sudo apt update
  

• apt is what is known as a package manager
  • A package mangager is a tool used by linux admins to make sure that software is installed, kept up to date and mangaged properly
  • Package managers allow Linux servers to be configured quickly and easily
• The system will now update apt and make sure we can install whatever packages we need to
• A software updater message will pop up as well but we can ignore that for now

• Enter into the terminal

      sudo apt install nginx
  

  • This is asking the package mangager to install a package known as nginx
  • nginx is what we will be using to host a website off of this virtual machine
• When the package manager asks if you want to continue, Type capital Y, and it will install the nginx to our virtual machine

Setting up Nginx

• When the installation is done, we will be back at our shell, and we can check that status of ufw with the following command

  sudo ufw status
  

• This command should have the output showing nginx is not active

• We can activate nginx with two commands

  sudo ufw enable
  sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'
  

  

• These commands tell ufw to turn on and allow HTTP connections on port 80
• If we open up firefox again and go to http://127.0.0.1:80 which is our local host we will see this

• Now we are offically hosting a webpage on our virtual machine
• To access the webpage from your real machine, type the command ip addr show into the terminal
  • There should be an ip address listed under inet
• Open a browser up on your real computer and you should see the exact same page

• You are now hosting a site on a linux webserver, meaning by definition you are a Linux Server admin

Getting your own site onto NGINX

• Today we are just going to worry about static HTML sites
  • Should we prepare a HTML file for them to host
• Make sure your HTML file is called index.html
• In the terminal use cd (change directory) to navigate to the directory with your html files in it

  sudo mv *.html /var/www/html/
  

• * is whats called a wildcard, it can be used to select multiple files matching a condition
  • In this case the condition is a file ending in .html
  • If you have css, image or any other kinds of files on your website use them as well (*.css, *.png/jpg/gif, *.js for example)
• This copies it to the file where the HTML files for Nginx are kept
• To be safe we will restart Nginx using systemd
  • Systemd is a linux utility that is used to manage programs known as damons
  • damons are background services that run utilities

    sudo systemctl restart nginx
    

• Now if you go to your website again, you will see it has updated with your page