Add nginx.exe as Windows system service (like Apache)?

Question

I set up NGINX as a front end server for static content and I use Apache as a back-end server for other thing.

The thing is I can\'t find a logical answer that allow

Answer 1

NSSM is the best tool to run Nginx as a service.
If you do not want to use any external 3rd party software then you can implement any of these two methods.

• Windows Task Scheduler
• Windows startup shortcut

Windows Task Scheduler

• As mentioned in this answer prepare one start.bat file.
• Put this file where nginx.exe is present.
• Open windows task scheduler and set up the task as described in this answer to run it indefinitely.
• Do not forget to run this task as the highest privilege with the system account, more details can be found here.
• Make the task to start daily at a certain time, through the bat file it will check whether the service is already running to avoid creating multiple nginx.exe instances.
• If due to some reason Nginx shuts down, within 5 minutes it will start.

Windows Startup shortcut

• Create one shortcut of nginx.exe and put it in the startup folder of Windows.

• Follow this answer to find your startup location.

• Nginx will run automatically whenever you log in to the system.
• This one is the easiest. However, it is dependent on user profile i.e. if you are running Nginx on a server, it will run only for your user account, when you log off it stops.
• This is ideal for dev environment.

Answer 2

The easiest way I've found, was using the Chocolatey package manager.

Once Chocolatey is installed, you open an administrative prompt and type:

choco install nginx

You now have a Windows service named 'nginx' running.

Answer 3

Rather than turning nginx into a service, or using CMD to start a process, which really doesn't seem to work. I found that Powershell makes it easy to startup nginx as a detached process. I've combined starting nginx with PHP. Below is the script, named "start-nginx.ps1"

$fcgiPort = "127.0.0.1:9000"
$PHPini = "c:\php\php.ini"

$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"

function restart { 
Push-Location /nginx
Stop-Process -Force -Name nginx 
Start-Process ./nginx.exe   -WindowStyle Hidden 

Stop-Process -Force -Name php-cgi
Start-Process  "c:\php\php-cgi.exe" -ArgumentList ("-b" + $fcgiPort  +  " -c "  +  $PHPini)   -WindowStyle Hidden 
Pop-Location
}

restart

This script can be executed from any directory, but needs to be customized for where your nginx installation is located.

This script includes a silent attempt to kill nginx and PHP before launching both.

Windows systems are supposed to recognize ".ps1" files as powershell, even in the CMD prompt.

I created another small script to kill the running processes, which simply removes the "start-process" lines from this file.

To run at startup, I used the win-R command to navigate to the directory shell:startup

Placing a shortcut to the startup script in this directory, nginx starts at boot!

Powershell also includes a much more sophisticated ability to schedule tasks, and it is possible to schedule this script to run at startup. See This Link

From the article:

 >powershell

 $trigger = New-JobTrigger -AtStartup -RandomDelay 00:00:30
 Register-ScheduledJob -Trigger $trigger -FilePath $HOME/start-nginx.ps1 -Name startNginx

Combined, I think this approach gets you everything you'd need from an nginx windows service and doesn't require any third-party applications.