Sometimes you may need to find out what user NGINX is running as. Here is how to check what user NGINX is running as using ps command.
How to Check What User NGINX is Running As
ps command lists all processes in your system. You can easily determine the user running NGINX server with the following command.
$ sudo ps aux| grep nginx
In the above command, ps command will list all active processes and pass its output to grep where we search for lines containing “nginx”.
You will see an output similar to the following.
www-data 1488 0.0 0.1 162184 7634 ? Ss Apr29 0:02 /usr/bin/nginx www-data 1497 0.0 0.1 162184 7268 ? S Apr29 0:00 /usr/bin/nginx www-data 1498 0.0 0.1 162184 7926 ? S Apr29 0:00 /usr/bin/nginx www-data 1422 0.0 0.1 162184 7784 ? S Apr29 0:00 /usr/bin/nginx
You an even use top or htop command to find NGINX user.
You can also open NGINX configuration file to view the user. Let us say your NGINX configuration file is located at /home/ubuntu/nginx.conf. Use the following command to open it in a text editor.
$ sudo vi /home/ubuntu/nginx.conf
Look for the user directive. It will give you the username running NGINX. Here is an example.
user www-data
Also read : How to Configure TLS/SSL passthrough in NGINX
Change NGINX User
If you want to change NGINX user just open NGINX configuration file as shown above
$ sudo vi /home/ubuntu/nginx.conf
and update user directive with new user (e.g nginx_user). Change
user www-data
to
user nginx_user
Restart NGINX server to apply changes.
$ sudo /usr/bin/nginx -s reload
In this article, we have learnt how to find out which user is running NGINX server, and also how to change it.
Also read : How to Fix NGINX : Too Many Open Files Error