Set Up NGINX

If you don’t want HTTPS (for communications between the external world and your node), then you can skip all the NGINX steps on this page.

Note: This simple deployment template uses NGINX for more than just HTTPS. For example, it also does basic rate limiting.

Install NGINX

SSH into your machine and install NGINX:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

Configure & Reload NGINX

Get an SSL certificate for your node’s subdomain (such as bnode.example.com).

  • Copy the SSL private key into /etc/nginx/ssl/cert.key

  • Create a “PEM file” (text file) by concatenating your SSL certificate with all intermediate certificates (in that order, with the intermediate certs last).

  • Copy that PEM file into /etc/nginx/ssl/cert.pem

  • In the bigchaindb/bigchaindb repository on GitHub, find the file nginx/nginx.conf and copy its contents to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf on your machine (i.e. replace the existing file there).

  • Edit that file (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf): replace the two instances of the string example.testnet2.com with your chosen subdomain (such as bnode.example.com).

  • Reload NGINX by doing:

    sudo service nginx reload