var/www

[Rob Schultz]

Hi Paul,
> A quick side question - do you know whether I can run nginx as well as 
> apache2 on the server? nginx would handle all ports except eBox 
> administration. Just a thought - not important really, but I am not sure 
> whether eBox needs apache2.
You can have apache listen on a separate port then apache2 and either access apache directly via the alternate port or you can have nginx proxy to the apache port so you can use standard access.

> The web server will have two domains to host from the same fixed IP, and 
> needs SSL for one of them.
You can have multiple servers on 1 ip address easily. http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpCoreModule#server  there are limitations with SSL and ip addresses SNI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication is needed if you want multiple hosts with SSL. 

> The trial computer now has all apache2 files taken off, and nginx is now 
> the web server. One of the web sites will be a rails site.
> 
> The rails site on the trial computer is at /home/paul/sites/my_app/, and 
> has all the usual sub-directories created by rails. I don't know where 
> to put the rails files on the web server at present.
You can put them anywhere you want on the server as long as you point it to the location of your rails app.
I personally use a structure like 
/var/www/domain.com/ to hold the website. and then just put the roots to the proper location. if its a standard website i normally create a htdocs folder for all the web files. If its rails app i just use the rails structure and put everything in public etc etc. 

> 
> There seem to be 4 files with configuration for gninx it them:
> 
> /var/nginx/conf/nginx.conf (this one I changed - probably the wrong 
> one!)
> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (no changed made since installation)
> /etc/nginx/sites-available/default (no changed made since installation)
> /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default (no changed made since installation)
Using Debain 5.0 the config files are /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and probably the sites-availabe and sites-enabled ones. I am sure Ubuntu has the same structure. 

> (virtual host, ssl and php are # out at present - I take it that is 
> default)
http://wiki.nginx.org is good resource for finding example configuration files and all the modules.

V/r,
Rob Schultz