Nginx

This is a base Nginx service that terminates TLS, and can be used as a reverse proxy for arbitrary services by adding new entries in /root/nginx/conf.d and sudo systemctl reload nginx.

Installation

Copy the service definition

scp services/nginx/nginx.service <instance>:

sudo mv nginx.service /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service

Create a directory to house service specific configuration

sudo mkdir -p /root/nginx/conf.d

Add the SSL certificate provided by Cloudflare

sudo tee /root/nginx/cert.pem
sudo tee /root/nginx/key.pem

Tell systemd to pick up new service definition, enable it (so that it automatically starts on boot going forward), and start it.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now nginx

Adding a service

When adding new services that sit behind Nginx,

1. Add its nginx conf file to /root/nginx/conf.d

2. Restart nginx (sudo systemctl reload nginx)

Configuration files

All the files we put into /root/nginx/conf.d get included in an http block. We can see this in the default configuration of nginx:

http {
    ...
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

To view the default configuration, run the following command against the official Docker image for Nginx, which is also what we use:

Copy

docker run --rm --entrypoint=cat nginx /etc/nginx/nginx.conf > /tmp/nginx.conf

This is a handy tool to check the syntax of the configuration files. Alternatively, you can run docker exec nginx nginx -t on the instance to ask nginx to check the configuration.

Updating configuration

Nginx configuration files can be changed without needing to restart anything.

1. Update the configuration file at /root/nginx/conf.d/museum.conf
2. Verify that there are no errors in the configuration by using sudo docker exec nginx nginx -t.
3. Ask nginx to reload the configuration sudo systemctl reload nginx.