Engintron is an open-source Nginx installer to integrate Nginx on cPanel servers.

In cPanel, there is no built-in support for the Nginx web server. Therefore, users find it problematic to set up Nginx as a reverse proxy.

In that case, we can use a third-party plugin like Engintron to configure Nginx as a web traffic proxy.

As part of our Server Management Services, we assist our customers with several cPanel queries.

Today, we’ll see how our Support Engineers configure Engintron in cPanel and fix the related errors.

Installing Engintron in cPanel

Unlike Apache, setting up Engintron for Nginx increases serving capacity, improves the performance of dynamic content & drops the load on cPanel servers.

Thereby, Nginx performs well under heavy traffic spikes.

Engintron app dashboard has some utilities to monitor things like Nginx access & error logs.

Furthermore, the installation of the Engintron plugin on the cPanel server is not a complicated process.

Let’s see how our Support Engineers install them.

1. We login via SSH access to the terminal & execute the following command.

   cd /rm -f engintron.sh  
   wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/engintron/engintron/master/engintron.sh  
   bash engintron.sh install

2. Next, we log in to cPanel/WHM servers.
3. And go to Plugins and click Engintron for cPanel/WHM.

Thus, Engintron is successfully installed & it will open a dashboard where we can manage Nginx.

Common errors & fixes

From our experience in managing servers, we’ve seen many customers with errors related to Engintron on cPanel.

Let’s take a closer look at how our Support Engineers fix them.

• Wrong settings in Engintron file

Recently, one of our customers reported us that after installing Engintron he tried to access the website. But, it resulted in an error like

502 Bad Gateway

This error happens when there are incorrect settings in the Engintron file for Nginx.

In order to fix this, we follow the below steps:

1. First, we log in to Cpanel/WHM servers.
2. After that, we navigated to Plugins > Engintron for cPanel/WHM.
3. Under Nginx, we click on Edit your custom_rules for Nginx.
4.  Then, we uncomment the following line by removing the # character

   set $PROXY_DOMAIN_OR_IP “XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX”;

5. Finally, we click on update rules.

This fixes the problem & the user could visit the site without any error.

• Awstats showing wrong statistics after Engintron installation

Similarly, another customer approached us to fix his website Awstats. For this customer, the Awstats showed wrong statistics after completing the Engintron installation.

The customer was very sure that it was related to Engintron as it was working fine earlier.

As the first step of the investigation, we checked the logs to find the cause of the problem.

Likewise, we could see that the Apache logs were showing only the entries of the Nginx server.

Then in the Apache configuration, the log format was set as

LogFormat "%h %a %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

So the logs were containing the server IP first and then the client IP.

This incorrect data appeared because of the reverse proxy setup since apache was seeing only connections from the Nginx server.

Therefore, to fix the problem our Support Engineer has to change the log format in the “post_virtualhost” file from WHM in apache configuration as below:

We navigate to WHM »Home »Service Configuration »Apache Configuration »Include Editor

LogFormat "%a %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

Then, we updated the Awstats statistics, by running the below script:

/scripts/runweblogs

Eventually, the error was fixed.

[Having trouble after installation? We’ll fix it for you.]

Conclusion

In short, Engintron is a third-party plugin to integrate Nginx on cPanel servers. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers install Engintron in cPanel & fix relating errors.