By default, the Nginx version displayed when you query HTTP headers generated by the Nginx server.

For instance below config taken from Docker Nginx 1.18 Stable image:

# /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
user  nginx;
worker_processes  1;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

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

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    #gzip  on;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

If we send request to the server we get a headers like below:

$ http --headers localhost:8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 612
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2020 15:05:27 GMT
ETag: "5e9eea60-264"
Last-Modified: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 12:43:12 GMT
Server: nginx/1.18.0

I used httpie but you can use curl as well:

$ curl -I localhost:8080

Hiding

In order to hide Nginx server header info we need to add server_tokens off; to the config file.

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# /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
user  nginx;
worker_processes  1;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

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

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    #gzip  on;

    # Here we add
    server_tokens off;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

Now if you send request you will see:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 612
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2020 15:05:27 GMT
ETag: "5e9eea60-264"
Last-Modified: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 12:43:12 GMT
Server: nginx

Info

We can set server_tokens in http, server, or location context only.

All done!