I found the nginx module and configured it in webmin (setting paths to the nginx config files).
No errors, but at the bottom of the webmin dashboard, in the last section, which shows services (running or not), there is no nginx. If I go to virtualmin and look in “features and plugins” there is no nginx.
To be clear, nginx is running, the stop/start button in the webmin panel shown above does start and stop the service properly. It just seems like some part of webmin/virtualmin don’t know it’s there.
Is this an active project or is it on the way out? I was looking at the paid options, but don’t want to hitch my horse to something that may or may not be a going concern…
Anyhow, the docs are all over the place for this stuff. I found a “manual install” process that mentions an entire repo of virtualmin modules that don’t seem to be listed in the “module” manager: http://software.virtualmin.com/gpl/wbm
There are two nginx modules in that repo and when I installed them, they certainly seem to work. But I have no idea why they don’t show up in the module list inside webmin.
Ok , but are you aware you can have very nice vps setups these days for about 3 euro, check out Hetzner, what sort of work and traffic do you do exactly, will give me a better picture!
Unfortunately FreeBSD doesn’t get a lot of testing, and most of us are not too familiar with it, so troubleshooting can be kind of tough… is using Linux as an OS an option? As getting Nginx running on that can be a lot simpler. The installer actually has an option to configure Nginx rather than Apache on Linux.
Thanks all, I might circle back in a few months, looking at some other options now, specifically Froxlor. Please don’t take this as a dig, it’s just a really minimal project that basically spits config files out, making it pretty OS-agnostic, and if I’d researched more, I would have landed there earlier. It’s a nice fit for me (sysadmin for 2+ decades) since it lets me override stuff and again, it’s a very small project and I can wrap my head around what it’s doing pretty easily.
As for apache vs. nginx, I think you folks are probably correct - for “normal” users, having .htaccess and such work as expected is a benefit, and from what I’m seeing so far, apache can be made to behave pretty well. Thanks for all the input.