Default Web Root¶

What is a "Web Root"?¶

The web root is the folder on your server where Nginx looks for your HTML files to serve. When someone visits your IP or domain, Nginx reads index.html from this folder and sends it to the browser.

Think of it like this: Nginx is a librarian. The web root is the library. When someone asks for a book (a webpage), the librarian goes to the library (web root) and fetches it.

The Problem: Ubuntu and CentOS Use Different Web Roots¶

This is one of the most common mistakes — even for experienced engineers. The location of the web root depends on which Linux distribution you are using.

Why Are They Different?¶

This is a result of how each Linux distribution decided to organize system files:

• Debian/Ubuntu follows the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) convention of putting user-served web content under /var/www/
• Red Hat/CentOS packages Nginx with content under /usr/share/nginx/html/ as part of the Nginx package's own shared data

Neither is wrong. They are just different conventions that each distro adopted.

How to Always Find the Correct Web Root¶

You never have to guess. Run this command on any server:

grep -r "root" /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default    # Ubuntu/Debian
grep -r "root" /etc/nginx/nginx.conf               # CentOS/RHEL

The output will look like:

root /var/www/html;

Whatever path appears after root — that is your web root.

Practical Example¶

On Ubuntu EC2:¶

# CORRECT — this works
echo "Love you Ibtisam from London" | sudo tee /var/www/html/index.html

# WRONG — nginx will NOT serve this file
echo "Love you Ibtisam from London" | sudo tee /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html

On CentOS EC2:¶

# CORRECT — this works
echo "Love you Ibtisam from Mumbai" | sudo tee /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html

Why sudo tee Instead of sudo echo > file?¶

This is another classic gotcha. The > redirection is handled by the shell, not by the command itself. So even if you write sudo echo "...", the shell tries to open the file for writing — and it does this as your regular user (e.g., ubuntu), not as root. Permission is denied.

sudo tee works because tee is the program that opens and writes the file, and you are running tee with sudo — so it has root permission.

# This FAILS — shell opens the file as ubuntu user
sudo echo "hello" > /var/www/html/index.html

# This WORKS — tee opens the file as root
echo "hello" | sudo tee /var/www/html/index.html