I destroyed my nginx config after upgrading :(

This isn’t really a question, I guess, as I think I can recover things, but perhaps it’s a cautionary tale, and maybe someone has some insight to offer.

I recently upgraded a droplet from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04. One of the last steps of do-release-upgrade is to remove outdated packages, but it warns that could take hours, so I deferred that until after the machine was back up and running. Everything seemed fine, so I went about removing old packages. Based on advice found online, I also removed config files for everything marked RC in dpkg -l. That was a mistake, as one of the packages was nginx, and that wiped out my /etc/nginx directory, as well as /var/log/nginx, and perhaps others.

It was extremely puzzling, because the server was still running just fine. I realized it only reads the config when it starts up and doesn’t need it again.

Now, there’s still an nginx installed, as shown by dpkg -l, so I don’t know why the dpkg --purge removed the config files. I consider this a bug.

Fortunately, I did a snapshot just before the upgrade, and I’m instantiating a new droplet from it, hoping to copy over the nginx config.

It’s too bad one can’t mount a snapshot as a filesystem on an existing droplet. I think that would be a very useful feature.