How to Remove NGINX Server Header in Ubuntu 18.04

For me, it is good to remove the server info footprint in the response header to minimize security threats to your server. So how do you remove NGINX server header in Ubuntu 18.04?

Before going into the tutorial, most of the server that I know e.g. Apache, IIS, LiteSpeed, Tengine will return the server info in response header by default. So I’m sure there are also resources on how to remove server header on these servers.

You can verify a response header by running “curl -I <domain-name>“. Sample response header for Apache, Nginx, IIS, and LiteSpeed as follows:

curl -I apache.org
 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:18:21 GMT
 Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)
 Last-Modified: Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:10:21 GMT
 ETag: "14cfe-59a8477e48ef8"
 Accept-Ranges: bytes
 Content-Length: 85246
 Vary: Accept-Encoding
 Cache-Control: max-age=3600
 Expires: Wed, 25 Dec 2019 11:18:21 GMT
 Content-Type: text/html

curl -I nginx.com
 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
 Server: nginx/1.17.3
 Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:04:31 GMT
 Content-Type: text/html
 Content-Length: 169
 Connection: keep-alive
 Keep-Alive: timeout=15
 Location: https://www.nginx.com/

curl -I litespeedtech.com
 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
 Location: https://www.litespeedtech.com/
 X-FRAME-OPTIONS: SAMEORIGIN
 Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:08:24 GMT
 Server: LiteSpeed
 Connection: Keep-Alive

curl -I iis.net
 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
 Content-Length: 0
 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
 Location: https://iis.net/
 Server: Microsoft-IIS/10.0
 Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:12:21 GMT