After each modification in your nginx config file do : sudo nginx -t

It will tell you if there are any error in config file.
If everything is ok, do : sudo service nginx reload

reload = nginx will reload your configuration, without restart.
restart = stop and start again nginx. For some seconds, your website will be offline.

You can check your error log: cat /var/log/nginx/error.log (I think error.log is the default name)

Excuse me my bad english.

Your logs should indicate why that command failed. You can also use “nginx -t” to test your config for errors.

The logs are generally in /var/log/nginx

Hi, thanks! But when i try “nginx -t” i think i have an error:

nginx: [emerg] “location” directive is not allowed here in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:11
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed

it does not make any sense when I am trying to sudo service nginx restart and it said nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

its keeping failing.

what I am having the code here…

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

        root  /var/www/html/test2/public;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;

        # Make site accessible from http://localhost/
        server_name 222.231.22.22;

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
                # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location
                # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules
        }


        location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri /index.php =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
        }

the document root default is var/www/html

Is possible conflict with XAMPP or apache2.

I have the same problem! Did you find a fix per chance?

I’m having the same issue. sudo nginx -t says everything is good. And the reload seems to go just fine. But the restart fails and I am not sure where to go from here.

EDIT: I think my issue may be due to something else already listening on port 80 on my server. I’ll start there.

I have the same problem!
When i try
“ /usr/local/openresty/nginx/sbin/nginx -t -c /usr/local/openresty/nginx/conf/nginx.conf”
I get everything is ok
“nginx: the configuration file /usr/local/openresty/nginx/conf/nginx.conf syntax is ok”
“nginx: configuration file /usr/local/openresty/nginx/conf/nginx.conf test is successful”
What can i do?

Hey all, I was getting this issue as well. Running sudo tail /var/log/nginx/error.log (thanks @kamaln7!) show me the same errors as @dfansteel is getting. It looks like another task was running on port 80. This might not be the most elegant solution (someone pipe up if this is a bad idea), but you can kill the process by running sudo fuser -k 80/tcp. This allowed me to restart nginx without issue.

Thank you!!!!! This was so helpful!!!

This post was very helpful in identifying the error with nginx. Thanks!

dude, thank you!

Hi, all

As some users already mentioned you should always examine the error_log in order to check what’s wrong with the configuration:

You can either tail or cat the file:

tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log
tail -n 200 /var/log/nginx/error.log
cat /var/log/nginx/error.log

You can also check for any syntax errors:

sudo nginx -t

In newer OSs like CentOS 7 you can use use the journalctl command to see the logs that the journald daemon has collected.

When used alone, every journal entry that is in the system will be displayed within a pager (usually less) for you to browse. The oldest entries will be up top:

We have an existing tutorial on how to view and manipulate systemd logs.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-journalctl-to-view-and-manipulate-systemd-logs

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Alex