Back to Basics: Installing NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus

Today, NGINX continues to be the world’s most popular web server – powering more than a third of all websites and nearly half of the 1000 busiest as of this writing. With so many products and solutions, NGINX is like a Swiss Army Knife™ you can use for numerous website and application‑delivery use cases, but we understand it might seem intimidating if you’re just getting started.

If you’re new to NGINX, we want to simplify your first steps. There are many tutorials online, but some are outdated or contradict each other, only making your journey more challenging. Here, we’ll quickly point you to the right resources.

Resources for Installing NGINX

A good place to start is choosing which NGINX offering is right for you:

• NGINX Open Source – Our free, open source offering
• NGINX Plus – Our enterprise‑grade offering with commercial support

To find out which works best for you or your company, look at this side-by-side comparison of NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus. Also, don’t be afraid to experiment – NGINX users often try and learn tricks they pick up from others or the NGINX documentation. There’s always a lot to learn about how to get the most out of both NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus.

If NGINX Open Source is your choice, we strongly recommend you install it from the official NGINX repo, as third‑party distributions often provide outdated NGINX versions. For complete NGINX Open Source installation instructions, see Installing NGINX Open Source in the NGINX Plus Admin Guide.

If you think NGINX Plus might work better for your needs, you can begin a 30-day free trial and head over to Installing NGINX Plus for complete installation instructions.

For both NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus, we provide specific steps for all supported operating systems, including Alpine Linux, Amazon Linux 2, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Ubuntu.

Watch the Webinar

Beyond documentation, you can advance to the next stage on your NGINX journey by watching our free on‑demand webinar, NGINX: Basics and Best Practices. Go in‑depth on NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus and learn:

• Ways to verify NGINX is running properly
• Basic and advanced NGINX configurations
• How to improve performance with keepalives
• The basics of using NGINX logs to debug and troubleshoot

If you’re interested in getting started with NGINX Open Source and still have questions, join NGINX Community Slack – introduce yourself and get to know this community of NGINX power users! If you’re ready for NGINX Plus, start your 30-day free trial today or contact us to discuss your use cases.