NGINX 1.4.6 upgrade on AWS EC2

I've been working with NGINX a lot more lately and still love it.

The info:
Using AWS EC2 with Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty)
NGINX 1.4.6 as a web server

During a PCI compliance scan, it was found the the server I was working on was running NGINX 1.4.6, a version released on 2014-03-04, nearly 2 and a half years old (at this writing).

This is the default version installed with the AWS packages for Ubuntu anyway, but I'm not sure about other packages.

On the DEV machine I was using, I tried to do the basic update:
sudo apt-get install nginx

The resulting version of NGINX was still 1.4.6, so I figured it was the repo being used.


FIRST STEP: Make sure you backup your config files!!! To some place other than /etc/nginx/, like perhaps your home dir. When I performed my install, all the files in /etc/nginx/sites-available were deleted.

I found this nice article on nginx's website: https://www.nginx.com/resources/admin-guide/installing-nginx-open-source/#prebuilt_ubuntu
I followed the above section on Ubuntu and everything went great.


After the upgrade was complete, I was running 1.11.4. Great! But now I had to configure my website.
The files in /etc/nginx/sites-available  were gone, so I copied my backup to that directory.

Then in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

1. set user to www-data
2. Add the line if you are still using sites-available:
1. include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

In the directory /etc/nginx/conf.d, rename default.conf to something else.

Restart NGINX:
sudo service nginx restart