Getting started

[Francis Daly]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 11:50:21PM +0000, James Read wrote:

Hi there,

nginx uses a single config file, which may "include" other files.

When a request comes in to nginx, it chooses one "server" to handle
the request; and then (with some exceptions) it chooses one "location"
to handle the request.

> I edited the config file as follows:
> 
> http {
>         server {
>                 location / {
>                         root /www;
>                 }
>         }
> ...
> }
> 
> I then reloaded the config file with sudo nginx -s reload. I created a test
> file at /www/index.html then when I tried to load the page in my browser I
> still got the default Welcome to nginx! page.
> 
> What am I doing wrong?

One possibility is that your browser had cached its previous request
to nginx, so it never asked nginx for the request this time. If you
use "curl" to make a test request of the page, it should avoid that
possibility.

Another possibility is that the config file that you edited is not the
config file that the running nginx is using.

Or maybe, the server{} that you edited is not the server{} that nginx
chooses to handle the particular request that you made.

The nginx access log file should show something if the request got to
nginx -- that might rule out the first possibility above.

The nginx error log -- especially if it is in "debug" mode -- may show far
more than you ever want to know about what nginx is doing with a request.

That *might* show something about the other possibilities.

> I also tried editing the page at /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html None of
> my edits seem to have any effect. When I tried to load the page in my
> browser I still got the default Welcome to nginx! page.

That one is most likely browser caching, I guess.

Cheers,

	f
-- 
Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org