Nginx Config Boilerplate

Modular Nginx config for modern, secure sites in ~2018 2019 2020 2021 2022~ 2023.

凭谁问：廉颇老矣，尚能饭否？——辛弃疾

This project aims to be a modular Nginx config template to ease common tasks like proxying websites, redirecting URLs, (semi-automatically) signing Let's Encrypt, offloading SSL, etc.

Compatibility

We assume you are always using the newest mainline version of Nginx with at least the official sets of modules. Some new exciting features (http2, stream, etc.) are not supported on old versions (stable and/or distro packages).

Here is instruction for installing latest version of nginx.

Compatibility with other Nginx-derived projects (OpenResty, etc.) and 3rd party modules are not verifyed. If you have interest in verifying with/supporting them, contributions are welcomed.

Installation

If you already have production sites running on Nginx, don't do anything stupid. You should only take essential pieces from here and evaluate your own config on staging environment.

If you are starting with a clean Nginx installation without any custom config, you can directly replace your nginx config sketelon with this one:

# run as root
rm -r /etc/nginx
git clone https://github.com/Jamesits/nginx-config-boilerplate.git /etc/nginx
cd /etc/nginx
./helper_scripts/kickstart.sh

mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service.d
cat > /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service.d/override.conf <<EOF
[Service]
LimitNOFILE=1048576
EOF
systemctl stop nginx
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable --now nginx

Usage

Directory Structure

• conf.d/*.conf is where your HTTP/HTTPS config lives
• stream.conf.d/*.conf is for TCP proxy

There are various examples/*.conf files in these two directory; you can use them as a start point (copy it to conf.d/ or stream.conf.d/ and rename them) and modify it to suit your needs. Basically you need to change these values:

• server_name to your domain (set up DNS to point to your server IP!)
• proxy_pass to your backend or what you want to proxy from
• ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key to your SSL key file (If you use certbot then you may only need to edit example.com part)

Updating

Sometimes this config skeleton might change, for example, when old TLS configuration is deprecated. To update:

# run as root
cd /etc/nginx
./helper_scripts/update.sh

Semi-automatic Let's Encrypt signing

We implemented a semi-automatic LE signing method with no service disruption during signing process. This require certbot be installed and auto renew timer is configured correctly on your system.

To get a TLS cert:

# run as root
cd /etc/nginx
./helper_scripts/letsencrypt.sh your.domain.example.com

Notes

If you think this is helpful, please consider buy me a coffee.

This config template is originated from a production server (One of my load balancers running Ubuntu 16.04). They are based on the official config template of Nginx 1.12.

Some fossil versions of Nginx uses a different directory structure:

• /etc/nginx/sites-available/*.conf to store all sites configuration;
• /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf are symlinks from sites-available and they are actually included in the main config.

We do not use this structure anymore, and conf.d/ works exactly the same like sites-enabled/ (though without the symlinks). If you want to temporary disable a config just append a .disabled on its name (other suffixes are fine as long as the last part of the file name is not .conf).