Nginx Restart Fails and Show Not Running, But Site is Being Served.

I have a droplet that I initially set up host gitlab, just the stock installation. My trying to modify it to support other, very light weight sites. I followed the instructions from the Digital Ocean tutorial.

I followed all the steps and when attempting to restart

root@git ~# service nginx restart
 * Restarting nginx nginx                                                                            [fail] 

I’ve done some extensive searches of the web and got turned on to nginx -t.

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

When I check the nginx status:

service nginx status
nginx is not running

or

/etc/init.d/nginx status
 * nginx is not running

I restarted my droplet and the netstat comes back with nginx listening. But when I run service --status-all the nginx line is :

[ - ]  nginx

What am I missing?