Install linux-dash on Nginx : PHP Server Monitoring Tool

Here the Steps on How to Install linux-dash on Nginx, Ubuntu Server. linux-dash is a Lightweight, PHP Server Monitoring Tool Which is Easy. We are assuming a setup like we wrote in details as steps – WordPress Nginx Setup. We are assuming that you are a basic user. We discovered this linux-dash PHP, Node.js, Go, compatible web tool from GitHub. The GUI looks great and easy to use. At this moment, you will use the original linux-dash.

Needed Setup to Install linux-dash on Nginx, The PHP Server Monitoring Tool

We are taking it as a fresh cloud server instance. We suggest to use Nginx Extras instead of Nginx as cache purge module is available with Nginx Extras. We need to install these components :

We suggest not to change default Nginx file names and path of root for easy troubleshooting over the Internet on Q&A sites like StackExchange. We will change directory to default Nginx root of public FTP :

Then we will clone this repo of linux-dash :

Here we go :

Now, we will edit the file /etc/nginx/sites-available/default :

This is an example configuration, note that /usr/share/nginx/html :

Open php.ini, locate the disable_the functions line to make sure that shell_exec and exec are not listed. Restart the services :

Navigate to http://your-ip/linux-dash/ to see the stuffs. Now you should have an insight into server’s status through the linux dash dashboard.

Conclusion : PHP Server Monitoring Tool linux-dash

For support, general community support and questions, please see the repo page on GitHub.

We in previously published article shown a pretty sweet dashboard for our infrastructure using Graphite, Grafana and collectd. That was a difficult to handle by an ordinary user. This is easier & practical.

As linux dash gives access to sensitive information, you need to restrict access to this directory. This is Nginx documentation on password protecting a directory :

and run service nginx restart, it makes the interface inaccessible to all. This block needs to be added :

conf/htpasswd itself means that the code will use the htpasswd file in /etc/nginx/conf/ directory but we used the full path. To generate that .htpasswd file, you can use this kind of service :

Or use this :

Obviously, change username and password to real one. I do not know why most of the websites suggest to run :

for only generating the .htpasswd file. There is openssl passwd command, PHP, Perl to do the same work.