Nginx subdomain configuration

Question

I have nginx acting as a reverse proxy to apache. I now need to add a new subdomain that will serve files from another directory, but at the same time I want all location an

Answer 1

Another type of solution would be to autogenerate the nginx conf files via Jinja2 templates from ansible. The advantage of this is easy deployment to a cloud environment, and easy to replicate on multiple dev machines

Answer 2

You could move the common parts to another configuration file and include from both server contexts. This should work:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name server1.example;
  ...
  include /etc/nginx/include.d/your-common-stuff.conf;
}

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name another-one.example;
  ...
  include /etc/nginx/include.d/your-common-stuff.conf;
}

Edit: Here's an example that's actually copied from my running server. I configure my basic server settings in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled (normal stuff for nginx on Ubuntu/Debian). For example, my main server bunkus.org's configuration file is /etc/nginx/sites-enabled and it looks like this:

server {
  listen   80 default_server;
  listen   [2a01:4f8:120:3105::101:1]:80 default_server;

  include /etc/nginx/include.d/all-common;
  include /etc/nginx/include.d/bunkus.org-common;
  include /etc/nginx/include.d/bunkus.org-80;
}

server {
  listen   443 default_server;
  listen   [2a01:4f8:120:3105::101:1]:443 default_server;

  include /etc/nginx/include.d/all-common;
  include /etc/nginx/include.d/ssl-common;
  include /etc/nginx/include.d/bunkus.org-common;
  include /etc/nginx/include.d/bunkus.org-443;
}

As an example here's the /etc/nginx/include.d/all-common file that's included from both server contexts:

index index.html index.htm index.php .dirindex.php;
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

location ~ /\.ht {
  deny all;
}

location = /favicon.ico {
  log_not_found off;
  access_log off;
}

location ~ /(README|ChangeLog)$ {
  types { }
  default_type text/plain;
}