Nginx not picking up site in sites-enabled?

Question

After over 10 hours of research I have not figured out why this doesn't work! I am trying to move my localhost to my sites-enabled folder which is in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default.

It IS a symlink from the sites-available folder. When using the following configuration I get an "unable to connect" using localhost:8080 as my address

nginx.conf (/usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf):

user  www-data;
worker_processes  2;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

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

sites-available (/etc/nginx/sites-available/default):

server {
  listen   8080;
  root /home/myusername/myown/customdirectory;
  index index.php index.html index.htm;
  server_name localhost;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
    }

    location /doc/ {
        alias /usr/share/doc/;
        autoindex on;
        allow 127.0.0.1;
        allow ::1;
        deny all;
    }


    error_page 404 /404.html;

    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root /usr/share/nginx/www;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

I can get this working if I put the relevant info from sites available to the nginx.conf, I just can't figure out why it doesn't work this way?

Thanks!

Are you sure that the symlink is not broken ? ls -l /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ — catalin.costache, Oct 03 '12 at 20:12
see also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17413526/nginx-missing-sites-available-directory — , Dec 18 '13 at 17:54
see also: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1195067/how-do-i-find-out-how-my-net-core-app-is-configured-to-run-on-an-ubuntu-vm-with/1195328#1195328. — Chris Halcrow, Dec 11 '19 at 06:40

score 218 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 01 '13 at 04:22

218

I had the same problem. It was because I had accidentally used a relative path with the symbolic link.

Are you sure you used full paths, e.g.:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com.conf

answered Jan 01 '13 at 04:22

Sam

4,475
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4

May be a problem with an incorrect path in the relative link more than it being a relative link at all. For example, if your link doesn't start with `../` to traverse up one directory, then enter `sites-available`. If you can `cat` the symlink and get output, Nginx should read it also as @Hannes said. Using an absolute path simply makes an incorrect path much more difficult to do. – Bryson Jan 25 '14 at 23:13
isn't there a command line tool for getting the absolute path of a file? – Jul 03 '14 at 23:35
1

Wow! This is precisely why [sites-enabled is evil](//serverfault.com/questions/527630/what-is-the-different-usages-for-sites-available-vs-the-conf-d-directory-for-ngi/870709#870709)! – cnst Aug 27 '17 at 21:30
mine also relative path didn't work, but followed this and it just worked fine with absolute paths, Thanks a lot! :D – Rakshitha Muranga Rodrigo Jul 20 '18 at 17:52
On WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), full path is required. Thanks for the hint! – By-Jokese Jun 11 '19 at 16:04
My problem was when i generated the link with partial path, but when I remake the link with full path nginx solved. – locopump Aug 09 '21 at 15:58

score 77 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 03 '17 at 21:24

77

Changing from:

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

to

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

fixed my issue

edited Jan 03 '17 at 21:24

Paul Roub

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answered Jan 03 '17 at 21:11

Roy Robles

771
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2

2

how did you figure this out? It worked for me, but this is not obvious – afarley Nov 20 '18 at 04:58
2

That was the issue for me! But in my case, it was looking for *.conf and mine had a different ending. Crazy I wasted hours over this! – Nigel Jul 27 '19 at 17:03
3

If you are wondering why this has an impact, by using `*.*` you will ignore `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default`, thus not loading the default vhost. – Bruno Leveque Apr 07 '22 at 04:24
This is amazing! It worked for me. And I don't need the default file, so remove the default file, then `*` worked for me. Thank you all! – Hyomin Kim Jul 04 '23 at 05:22

Joel Purra · Answer 3 · 2013-01-03T22:05:51.633

Include sites-available/default in sites-enabled/default. It requires only one line.

In sites-enabled/default (new config version?):

It seems that the include path is relative to the file that included it

include sites-available/default;

See the include documentation.

I believe that certain versions of nginx allows including/linking to other files purely by having a single line with the relative path to the included file. (At least that's what it looked like in some "inherited" config files I've been using, until a new nginx version broke them.)

In sites-enabled/default (old config version?):

It seems that the include path is relative to the current file

../sites-available/default

Nginx not picking up site in sites-enabled?

3 Answers3

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