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Serhat Teker
Serhat Teker

Posted on • Originally published at tech.serhatteker.com on

Hide NGINX Version

#nginx #server #proxy

By default, the Nginx version displayed when you query HTTP headers generated by the Nginx server.

For instance below config taken from Docker Nginx 1.18 Stable image:

# /etc/nginx/nginx.conf user nginx; worker_processes 1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" ' '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; sendfile on; #tcp_nopush on; keepalive_timeout 65; #gzip on; include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; }
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If we send request to the server we get a headers like below:

$ http --headers localhost:8080 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Accept-Ranges: bytes Connection: keep-alive Content-Length: 612 Content-Type: text/html Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2020 15:05:27 GMT ETag: "5e9eea60-264" Last-Modified: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 12:43:12 GMT Server: nginx/1.18.0
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I used httpie but you can use curl as well:

$ curl -I localhost:8080
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Hiding

In order to hide Nginx server header info we need to add server_tokens off; to the config file.

# /etc/nginx/nginx.conf user nginx; worker_processes 1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" ' '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; sendfile on; #tcp_nopush on; keepalive_timeout 65; #gzip on; # Here we add server_tokens off; include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; }
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Now if you send request you will see:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Accept-Ranges: bytes Connection: keep-alive Content-Length: 612 Content-Type: text/html Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2020 15:05:27 GMT ETag: "5e9eea60-264" Last-Modified: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 12:43:12 GMT Server: nginx
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INFO

We can set server_tokens in http, server, or location context only.

All done!

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