I just installed nginx on ubuntu 12.04 LTS. When i access localhost it gives me : 500 Internal Server Error nginx/1.2.3 error_log has following rewrite or internal redirection cycle while internally redirecting to "/index.html", client: 127.0.0.1, server: localhost, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "localhost" This is default nginx configuration: nginx.conf has: include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default has following root /usr/share/nginx/www; index index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name localhost; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules }