Pi-hole Migrate From Lighttpd Server to Nginx

In this post, I will share My Experience How I Migrate the Existing Server to Nginx. By default, Pi-hole Install and Configure the Lighttpd Server Webadmin Panel.

Before Migrating your Server to Nginx you need to make some changes in Pi-hole Setup File

• Open the File /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf
• replace true with false for the value INSTALL_WEB_SERVER and LIGHTTPD_ENABLED

INSTALL_WEB_SERVER=false
LIGHTTPD_ENABLED=false

• Save the Settings don’t restart the Pi-hole

Setup Nginx

• install Nginx on your web server
• install required PHP packages – I recommend PHP 7.4
• Configure Nginx for Pi-hole web admin
• Create a New File pihole.conf
• Add this Below Configuration to the Newly Created File

server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name blocker.example.com;

root /var/www/html;
index pihole/index.php index.php index.html index.htm;

charset UTF-8;

if ($scheme = http) {
return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=63072000;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
}
server {
listen 443 ssl http2;
listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

root /var/www/html;
server_name blocker.example.com;
autoindex off;

index pihole/index.php index.php index.html index.htm;

charset UTF-8;

if ($scheme = http) {
return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=63072000;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;

location / {
expires max;
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param FQDN true;
auth_basic "Restricted"; # For Basic Auth
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd; # For Basic Auth
add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=63072000;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
}

location /*.js {
index pihole/index.js;
}

location /admin {
root /var/www/html;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
#include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
#fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
#fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/$fastcgi_script_name;
auth_basic "Restricted"; # For Basic Auth
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd; # For Basic Auth
add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=63072000;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
}

location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}

ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/blocker.example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/blocker.example.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot

}

• save the Conf File
• For SSL use Certbot – https://certbot.eff.org/instructions
• Create Http Authentication using an apache-utils tool

sudo apt-get install apache2-utils -y
htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/.htpasswd username

• verify your Nginx Configuration

nginx -t

Pi-hole Migrate From Lighttpd Server to Nginx

• Stop and Disable the Lighttpd Server

service lighttpd stop

systemctl disable lighttpd

• Update ownership and Permission

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html

chmod -R 755 /var/www/html

• Admin Panel Access to the database

usermod -aG pihole www-data

• Update the pool Group in PHP-FPM

sed -i 's/group = www-data/group = pihole/g' /etc/php/7.4/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

• Restart the FPM

systemctl restart php7.4-fpm

• Enable Nginx Symlink

 sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/pihole.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/pihole.conf

• Reload and Restart the Nginx server

service nginx reload
service nginx restart

• Finally, restart the Pi-hole and Now it serves the Pi-hole web admin panel via Nginx server

 systemctl restart pihole-FTL

• That’s all done – Successfully Migrate From Lighttpd Server to Nginx

if you have doubts regarding this please drop your comments here I will Guide you.

Reference

• Configuring NGINX for Pi-hole
• Setup Pi-hole with Nginx