None of my configurations is taking effect on Nginx

@raafathamzeh

Please run this command to test your configuration first.

service nginx configtest

And you cannot have two server-sections competing for the same domain. And you cannot use wildcard (the *) like that with IP-addresses. And you have probably not added your server-section configurations to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled.

Then remember to run service nginx configtest and then service nginx reload after every change, so you test the configurations before rebooting nginx.

By the way, you do know that DigitalOcean is a competing company to DreamHost Servers ?

@raafathamzeh

include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

The above line tells NGINX to pull all website related configuration files from sites-enabled, so if you aren’t symlinking configuration files from sites-available to sites-enabled, then NGINX is loading the first or default configuration that it’s shipped with (normally named default).

When you run:

ls /etc/nginx/sites-available

… you should see a file called default or default.conf. This is the actual file. Now when you run:

ls /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

… the file you see there is the symlink (a link to the file in sites-available). You can safely delete that file as it’s just meant to be used as an example to get you started.

That being said, configuration will only be loaded from where you tell NGINX in nginx.conf, so if you don’t want to bother with symlinks (which can be a pain at times), I’d change this line:

include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

to

include /etc/nginx/sites-available/*;

… and save nginx.conf.

…

As for your actual configuration for your site/app, all configuration should be stored in one of the directories above (sites-available or siites-enabled) – if you do what I recommended above, then that would be sites-available. You don’t need to store configuration files for NGINX in a public directory (which appears to be the case for the second that you mention).

So if you have two configuration files for two sites, then you should have something such as:

/etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite01.conf
/etc/nginx/sites-available/mysite02.conf

Other than that, both of the configuration files you’ve posted are marked as default_server. This should only be defined for one configuration file, or not at all, else NGINX is going to throw an error.

Also, I always recommend cleaning up any configuration to prevent potential issues, so below is an exact copy of your NGINX configuration with all the un-needed filler, just to keep things clean.

user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 768;
    # multi_accept on;
}

http {
    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;

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

    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

    gzip on;
    gzip_disable "msie6";

    passenger_root /home/madrasati/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-head/gems/passenger-5.1.2;
    passenger_ruby /home/madrasati/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-head/wrappers/ruby;
    #include /etc/nginx/passenger.conf;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

@raafathamzeh

The apt-get remove ... command won’t remove NGINX configuration files – only packages.

Anything that was added by NGINX – such as configuration files – or anything you’ve added – also such as configuration files – won’t be removed; that’d be what apt-get purge ... is for.

i.e.

sudo apt-get purge nginx

or

sudo apt-get purge nginx-*

It is important to note, however, if you run purge, it will delete anything you’ve added. If you need to backup your existing configuration for reference, please do that before running the command.

Once NGINX is removed/purged, you can reinstall it using:

sudo apt-get -y install nginx-full

Once NGINX is installed, you can begin to reconfigure.