Important Nginx Files, Directories and Commands

FilesAndDirectories.md

Files And Directories

Content

/var/www/html: The actual web content, which by default only consists of the default Nginx page you saw earlier, is served out of the /var/www/html directory. This can be changed by altering Nginx configuration files.

Server Configuration

/etc/nginx: The Nginx configuration directory. All of the Nginx configuration files reside here.

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf: The main Nginx configuration file. This can be modified to make changes to the Nginx global configuration.

/etc/nginx/sites-available/: The directory where per-site "server blocks" can be stored. Nginx will not use the configuration files found in this directory unless they are linked to the sites-enabled directory (see below). Typically, all server block configuration is done in this directory, and then enabled by linking to the other directory.

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/: The directory where enabled per-site "server blocks" are stored. Typically, these are created by linking to configuration files found in the sites-available directory.

/etc/nginx/snippets: This directory contains configuration fragments that can be included elsewhere in the Nginx configuration. Potentially repeatable configuration segments are good candidates for refactoring into snippets.

Server Logs

/var/log/nginx/access.log: Every request to your web server is recorded in this log file unless Nginx is configured to do otherwise.

/var/log/nginx/error.log: Any Nginx errors will be recorded in this log.

ManageTheNginxProcess.md

Manage The Nginx Process

To stop your web server, you can type:

sudo systemctl stop nginx

To start the web server when it is stopped, type:

sudo systemctl start nginx

To stop and then start the service again, type:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

If you are simply making configuration changes, Nginx can often reload without dropping connections. To do this, this command can be used:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

By default, Nginx is configured to start automatically when the server boots. If this is not what you want, you can disable this behavior by typing:

sudo systemctl disable nginx

To re-enable the service to start up at boot, you can type:

sudo systemctl enable nginx