Setting up this website with Nginx

Fri Jul 10 2026

This is a little tutorial on setting up Nginx to serve this website.

At first, I went with Coolify since it provides me ease of deployment. Later I decided to wipe the server and start over since the tech stack is too complex for my taste, and I want to learn how to set it up myself.

Prerequisites

A server that can be SSH'd to (I use Hetzner with Debian 13 installed)
A domain (I registered one from Porkbun)
SSL Certificate, so this website can be served over HTTPS (Porkbun provides this as a bundle after them setting up SSL for my domain)

Setup

SSH to the server (make sure you set this up first):
```
ssh personal-server
```
Update the server (if required, restart the server using reboot command):
```
apt update && apt upgrade
```
Install nginx:
```
apt install nginx
```
Enable nginx on startup:
```
systemctl enable --now nginx
```

Add the following content to /etc/nginx/conf.d/personal-website.conf:

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name islabre.fyi;
    ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/islabre.fyi-ssl-bundle/domain.cert.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/islabre.fyi-ssl-bundle/private.key.pem;

    location / {
        root /var/www/html/Personal-Website;
    }
}

On the host, rsync both the website's build artifact and the SSL bundle to the server:

cd /path/to/Personal-Website/
npm run build
rsync -av --delete _site/ root@personal-server:/var/www/html/Personal-Website/

cd /path/to/folder/contain/islabre.fyi-ssl-bundle
rsync -av --delete islabre.fyi-ssl-bundle/ root@personal-server:/etc/ssl/islabre.fyi-ssl-bundle/

On the server, restart nginx:
```
systemctl restart nginx
```
Go to https://islabre.fyi. If the website shows up then you're done!