configuration-details.md

• The entire nginx configuration follows a tree-like / hierarchical structure.

• Each context has its specific settings which can be overwritten in the child context.

• We have main context which is the outermost one. The directives present outside any context in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf belong to the main context. We have the followings in it:

  main context
    ├── no. of worker processes to run
    ├── user to run the nginx process
    ├── info. about PID
    ├── error log location
    ├── event context
    │   ├── No. of connections per worker process
    │   └── ...
    ├── stream context
    │   ├── TCP/UDP settings
    │   └── ...
    └── http context
        ├── access-log location (for incoming req)
        ├── server context (multiple may exist)
        │   └── location context
        └── upstream context (used for reverse proxy,loadbalancing etc.)
  

• Generally, Nginx creates one master process and multiple worker processes.

• Virtual Server: We can host multiple domains from one physical server using multiple server blocks in NGINX config . This feature is called virtual server.

• It is recommended to keep /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (contains main, http and event contexts, generally) intact. So, we put our custom configuration files (containing server and upstream context, generally) inside /etc/nginx/conf.d/ and attach those at the end of http context in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf using include directive.

• In some distros like Ubuntu, there are folders like modules-enabled, site-enabled for holding config files, but we would stick to the above approach.

  • Hence, we can remove the following lines from /etc/nginx/nginx.conf .

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

• config files are named as follows:

  • cafe.codersgyan.com.conf
  • cornhub.com.conf