Hello. I’ve been working on setting up an nginx server setup the goal is to eventually script adding new subdomains but I’ve been having trouble with my initial test. I’ve read through a bunch of tutorials and they gloss over setting up the DNS records so I have a feeling that’s where the problem is. Any help would be much appreciated. I’ve probably missed something small but I can’t figure it out for the life of me.

Goal:

Have static site that is createdby.fi and multiple other static (and possibly later non-static) sites on subdomains like sub.createdby.fi.

Current State:

createdby.fi loads correctly, but sub.createdby.fi show index.html page from createdby.fi

Details on Setup:

Running: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS

DNS settings on Digital Ocean:

Excluded domains CNAME (just www) and NS for brevity.

I briefly trying using a CNAME record but that didn’t fix the problem and one of the tutorials I read said A records were the way to go. If that’s wrong please correct me.

Hosts File:

127.0.1.1 createdby.fi
127.0.1.1 sub.createdby.fi
127.0.0.1 localhost

Nginx Config Files:

/etc/nginx/sites-available/createdby.fi (symbolic linked in sites-enabled)

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;

        root /var/www/createdby.fi;

        index index.html;

        server_name createby.fi www.createdby.fi;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

/etc/nginx/sites-available/sub.createdby.fi (symbolic linked in sites-enabled)

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        root /var/www/sub.createdby.fi;

        index index.html;

        server_name sub.createby.fi www.sub.createdby.fi;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

/var/www/createdby.fi and /var/www/sub.createdby.fi both have boilerplate html files with different different text.

server_names_hash_bucket_size 64; uncommented in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf otherwise unchanged

Nginx has been restarted and server was rebooted.

I’ve cleared the browser cache and even tried flushing dns and deleting temp files on my browser, so I don’t think that’s the problem.