Dynamic and Abstract Nginx

Nginx is a powerful webserver and can built dynamically by injecting environment variables with envsubst and importing modular configs with the include directive.

envsubst

• Create /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.template with environment variables ${VAR}
• Use envsubst to dynamically generate a new /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

# Define the environment variables
export SERVER='example' LOG='example'

# Run command to generate new nginx.conf
cd /etc/nginx
envsubst '${SERVER},${LOG}' < nginx.conf.template > nginx.conf

brew install

Mac users will need to install gettext which includes envsubst.

brew install gettext
brew link --force gettext 

Include

From the example above using the sample http config.

* is a wildcard and will match on example.com.conf.

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

Here is an example folder structure for your Nginx modules.

/etc/nginx/
    nginx.conf                  # HTTP
    /conf.d                     # Server(s)
        example.com.conf        # Can contain multiple servers
        default.conf            # Comes with nginx
        *.conf
    /sites-enabled              # Includes
        /location               # Location Includes
            assets.inc          # /location blocks to static assets
            *.inc
        /SSL                    # SSL Includes
            example.com.inc     # Contains SSL directives for example.com
            *.inc
        /*                      # You can continue to modularize your code base
            *.inc

Check out this repo which has more include examples.

10up / nginx_configs

Nginx Configuration Template for WordPress Sites

Comments

[Samuel Suther]

Thanks for your post, it guide me in the right direction.

But what's heavily missing is where you show, what exactly to put into /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.template.
Do you only put:

${SERVER}
${LOG} 

in there?

A hint for those who need to execute this envsubst-command via sudo:

Use sudo -i, else you'll got an error like this: -bash: nginx.conf Permission denied

[aakhtar3]

Yes, you put the variable reference in the template.

You need to have the variables defined in scope before interpolating and generating the final config.