Tips

Find Vulnerabilities in Your Nginx Configuration

💡 Server security is hard. Moreso if you're still learning your way around. Luckily there are tools to guide us.

👉🏼 Gixy is one such tool for Nginx. It analyzes your configuration for security vulnerabilities.

https://github.com/yandex/gixy

Secure Your VPS: Use Non-Root User

💡 Root user in Linux has unrestricted access to a system. When compromised, an attacker gains complete control of the server.

👉🏼 It's best practice to use a non-root user and disable root login. Set PermitRootLogin to "no" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

Sites-Available vs Sites-Enabled in Nginx

💡 Nginx on Linux makes use of symlinks in a smart way to enable site configurations.

👉🏼 "sites-available" folder holds all your site configurations. In the "sites-enabled" folder you create symlinks to the previous folder for the sites you wish to enable.

Secure Your VPS: Disable Password Login

💡 Servers are often a target for SSH brute-forcing attacks. Disable password login to prevent an attacker from gaining access to your server.

👉🏼 Use a keypair for authentication and set PasswordAuthentication to "no" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

Find Popular JavaScript/Node.js Libraries

💡 Looking for a popular JavaScript or Node.js library in specific domain?

👉🏼 Best of JavaScript by @michaelrambeau is my go to resource to browse the JS ecosystem.

Tip: Order by 🌟 added last year.

https://bestofjs.org/

Secure File Transfer From/To Remote Server

💡 Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) is an easy way to securely transfer files to and from a remote server.

You can use scp to copy an entire project folder in order to deploy an app, or a single file like ".env".

Improve Nginx Performance: Direct File Transfers

💡 A quick tip to boost Nginx performance:

👉🏼 Speed up file transfers by using sendfile() to copy directly between descriptors rather than using read() & write().

Use Sudo Without Password Prompt in Scripts

💡 Using a non-root user and requiring a password for sudo is a security best practice. However, in scripts you often need to use sudo without a password.

👉🏼 Run:

➡️ sudo visudo

And add this line to "/etc/sudoers" to disable password req:

"youruser ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL"

Programatically Check If System Requires Restart

💡 How do you programatically find out if a system needs to be restarted?

👉🏼 Check for the existence of "/var/run/reboot-required" file. Also, "/var/run/reboot-required.pkgs" shows the related packages.

Don't Accidentally Serve Dotfiles With Nginx

💡 When serving your frontend app directly through Nginx, make sure to not accidentally expose any dotfiles.

👉🏼 Add a location directive to your server configuration to block access to all hidden files.