I had to figure out a few things to get Ubuntu installed and working well on VirtualBox.

I had to enable virtualization technologies in my BIOS. I have a Lenovo T520 and did this by pressing F1 during startup and then going to Security > Virtualization. If I did not do this then I would receive the error “VT-x features locked or unavailable in MSR” when trying to run with more than 1 CPU or 3584 MB of RAM.

The default disk is an 8GB dynamically expanding VDI. You may want to consider changing the default from 8GB to something more like 100GB. This is the max size only and will not be used unless needed.

Also, I had to run “sudo apt-get install dkms” to get the VirtualBox Guest Additions to work well.

Finally, I remapped the host key. By default all kinds of weird things happen when you use the right Ctrl button. This can be fixed by going to File > Preferences… > Input and then setting Host Key to something you never use like Pause.

Install nginx if it’s not already installed:

sudo apt-get install nginx

You must have the SSL module installed. The nginx docs say this is not standard. However, it does come installed on Ubuntu. You can verify by running nginx -V and looking for --with-http_ssl_module.

Next up is generating the SSL certs. Follow the Slicehost docs for this step.

Now you’ll need to update your /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file:

  server {
    server_name www.yourdomain.com yourdomain.com;
    rewrite ^(.*) https://www.yourdomain.com$1 permanent;
  }

  server {
    server_name local.yourdomain.com;
    rewrite ^(.*) https://local.yourdomain.com$1 permanent;
  }

  server {
    listen               443;
    ssl                  on;
    ssl_certificate      /etc/ssl/certs/myssl.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key  /etc/ssl/private/myssl.key;
    keepalive_timeout    70;
    server_name www.yourdomain.com local.yourdomain.com;
    location / {
      proxy_pass  http://backend;
    }
  }

Then restart nginx:

sudo nginx -s reload

Finally, in /etc/hosts put:

127.0.0.1   local.yourdomain.com

This will allow you to visit https://local.yourdomain.com/ which will be served up by the server that you have running on port 8080.