Issue with Installing Flarum on Ubuntu VPS: Apache and Nginx Port Conflict

epoxe

Hello everyone,

While trying to install Flarum on an Ubuntu VPS, I encountered an issue, and I’d like to share it here to discuss possible solutions. I followed a guide in Turkish forum.

The Situation: Apache comes pre-installed and running by default on the Ubuntu server. However, when I installed Nginx for Flarum, I encountered the following error:

Job for nginx.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status nginx.service" and "journalctl -xeu nginx.service" for details.

Error Details:

The output of the command


sudo journalctl -xeu nginx.service:

× nginx.service - A high performance web server and a reverse proxy server  
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)  
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since [date]; [time]  
    Process: [PID] ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/nginx -t -q -g daemon on; master_process on; (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)  
    Process: [PID] ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on; (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)  

nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Unknown error)  
nginx: [emerg] still could not bind()  
Cause of the Issue: After some research, I realized that both Apache and Nginx are trying to listen on port 80 simultaneously. This port conflict is preventing Nginx from starting.

My Questions:

Has anyone faced a similar situation?
Should I completely remove Apache first?

luceos

You cannot run apache and nginx next to each other. Flarum works perfectly fine with either. So if apache is already available, why not stick to it?

ernestdefoe

luceos you can as long as they aren’t listening on the same port. The control panel Plesk uses both but uses nginx as a reverse proxy for Apache. So both can be installed and running simultaneously but can’t listen on the same port.