NGinx Default public www location?

The default Nginx directory on Debian is /var/www/nginx-default.

You can check the file: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

and find

server {
        listen   80 default;
        server_name  localhost;

        access_log  /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log;

        location / {
                root   /var/www/nginx-default;
                index  index.html index.htm;
        }

The root is the default location.

If your configuration does not include a root /some/absolute/path; statement, or it includes one that uses a relative path like root some/relative/path;, then the resulting path depends on compile-time options.

Probably the only case that would allow you to make an educated guess as to what this means for you would be, if you downloaded and compiled the source yourself. In that case, the paths would be relative to whatever --prefix was used. If you didn't change it, it defaults to /usr/local/nginx. You can find the parameters nginx was compiled with via nginx -V, it lists --prefix as the first one.

Since the root directive defaults to html, this would, of course, result in /usr/local/nginx/html being the answer to your question.

However, if you installed nginx in any other way, all bets are off. Your distribution might use entirely different default paths. Learning to figure out what kind of defaults your distribution of choice uses for things is another task entirely.

If installing on Ubuntu using apt-get, try /usr/share/nginx/www.

EDIT:

On more recent versions the path has changed to: /usr/share/nginx/html

2019 EDIT:

Might try in /var/www/html/index.nginx-debian.html too.

'default public web root' can be found from nginx -V output:

nginx -V
nginx version: nginx/1.10.1
built with OpenSSL 1.0.2h  3 May 2016
TLS SNI support enabled
configure arguments: --prefix=/var/lib/nginx --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --pid-path=/run/nginx/nginx.pid --lock-path=/run/nginx/nginx.lock --http-client-body-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/tmp/client_body --http-proxy-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/tmp/proxy --http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/tmp/fastcgi --http-uwsgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/tmp/uwsgi --http-scgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/tmp/scgi --user=nginx --group=nginx --with-ipv6 --with-file-aio --with-pcre-jit --with-http_dav_module --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_gzip_static_module --with-http_v2_module --with-http_auth_request_module --with-mail --with-mail_ssl_module

the --prefix value is the answer to the question. for the sample above the root is /var/lib/nginx