NGINX Configuration Guide
What is NGINX?
NGINX is a high efficiency load balancer, request manipulator and static file server. The high efficiency comes from it's event-based architecture (as opposed to competing threaded or process-driven approaches).
Contents
Quickstart
Install the NGINX package from your favorite package manager. Here’s an example with yum:
yum install -y nginx
Create a directory at /etc/nginx/sites-available and /etc/nginx/sites-enabled for our site-specific configurations.
Open the configuration file created in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. Include the following line at the end of the http {} configuration block:
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
Start your NGINX service using the service start command. Configure nginx to auto-start using chkconfig on.
service nginx start
chkconfig nginx on
Adding a Site
Create a new file in /etc/nginx/sites-available called mydomain.com.conf. This is where we’ll place your domain-specific configuration. To make the site enabled, create a symbolic link to your configuration in the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled directory. Here’s an example:
# /etc/nginx/sites-available/statuslist.app.conf
server {
listen 80;
server_name statuslist.app;
root /opt/statuslist/www;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/
}
}
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ln -s statuslist.app.conf ../sites-available/statuslist.app.conf
NGINX Config Test
It’s important to test your config before you reload NGINX. If you have something wrong, NGINX will stop operating and your site will go down. It’s really easy to test your config. Run the nginx -t command and NGINX will print the validation results. See below for an example:
nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
