How to make nginx to listen to server_name:port

Question

In my nginx conf file, I have :

  listen       80;
    server_name  $hostname;

however if I do netstat I see that it is listening on 0.0.0.

Answer 1

The server_name^docs directive is used to identify virtual hosts, they're not used to set the binding.

netstat tells you that nginx listens on 0.0.0.0:80 which means that it will accept connections from any IP.

If you want to change the IP nginx binds on, you have to change the listen^docs rule.
So, if you want to set nginx to bind to localhost, you'd change that to:

listen 127.0.0.1:80;

In this way, requests that are not coming from localhost are discarded (they don't even hit nginx).