I thought for a bit the other day and realized that while I had nfs access between machines, and I had ssh control of one over the other, there was nothing akin to http access between the two. And while it’s rather like setting up a model train set — I can see the fun in it, but it doesn’t really interest me so the novelty wears off quickly — I poked around and set up nginx on an Arch machine.

My previous experiences with setting up Web servers were limited almost exclusively to Ubuntu-driven machines with Apache and so forth, which I only remember as taking quite a while to set up, and being quite educational in the process. In that sense I’m glad I didn’t start with nginx.

Because it barely took a second before the entire business was up and running … so I would have missed out on all that delightful educational value. 😉 I installed the nginx package, started the service, created a rudimentary index page, and bang, the entire experience was over. I typed in the address on a second machine, and the page sprung into view like it had been injected into browser with a nail gun.

I know next to nothing about Web servers and php and MySQL and so forth, and I know that installing nginx by itself is hardly more than a baby step toward a full-blown setup, but I was taken aback that it was so easy. I don’t remember what all goes into a LAMP server, but I seem to remember quite a lot more configuration than that.

All that being said it’s hardly my place to make any kind of endorsement, but I can tell you that if I ever have to work with http access in the future, I’m going to probably start with nginx and build on to that. Quick and painless sounds like a good place to start from. 😉