How to setup mass dynamic virtual hosts in nginx?

Question

Been playing with nginx for about an hour trying to setup mass dynamic virtual hosts. If you ever done it in apache you know what I mean.

Goal is to have dynamic subdom

Answer 1

As long as you are comfortable with scripting, it is not very hard to put together some scripts that will quickly set up vhosts in nginx. This slicehost article goes through setting up a couple of vhosts and does it in a way that is easily scriptable and keeps the configurations separate. The only downside is having to restart the server, but that's to be expected with config changes.

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Update: If you don't want to do any of the config maintaining yourself, then your only 2 options (the safe ones anyways) would be to either find a program that will let your users manage their own chunk of their nginx config (which will let them create all the subdomains they want), or to create such a user-facing management console yourself.

Doing this yourself would not be too hard, especially if you already have the scripts to do the work of setting things up. The web-based interface can call out to the scripts to do the actual work so that all the web interface has to deal with is managing who has access to what things.