shell environment variables in "include"-directive not working

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:49:21AM +0200, Markus Grobelin wrote:

> Hy everybody,
> i'm doing my first steps with nginx/0.8.36 and trying to get *NIX
> shell environment variables working inside the configuration files.
> Sadly, it's seems they aren't working inside the
> "include"-directive! :(

nginx doesn't have syntax for expanding environment variables in 
configuration file.  Syntax $var used for runtime per-request 
variables (supported by some directives, support explicitly noted 
in directive descriptions).

[...]

> The [emerg] indicates, that the $INSTANCE environment variable isn't
> expanded, whereas the "user" and "pid" directive doesn't raise an
> exception??

Because there is no syntax error in user "$USER" and config parser 
has nothing against it.  As you aren't running as root nginx 
just prints warning about being non-root and forgets about it.  
Under root you should see:

[emerg]: getpwnam("$USER") failed in /path/to/nginx.conf:line

(unless you actually have "$USER" in your /etc/passwd)

Similar thing with pid.  It's syntactically correct and will only 
produce error when nginx will try to create pid file.  If you 
happen to cleanup other critical config errors you should see 
something like this on startup:

[emerg]: open() "/nginx/$INSTANCE/run/nginx.pid" failed (2: No such file or directory)

(again, unless you actually have "/nginx/$INSTANCE/run/" directory)

Maxim Dounin