NGINX Example Configuration Bootstrap

What's in it?

• PHP 7 FPM configuration (mimetypes, file handling)
• example.com domain configuration
• modular snippets for easy domain configuration
• letsencrypt auto-renewal configuration
• nodejs / other service loopback
• domain-folder / subdomain-file file structure

What's required?

• NGINX
• Letsencrypt / certbot

Optional

• PHP 7 FPM

You can use any version of PHP which is compatible with your NGINX, keep in mind you might need to alter configuration snippets for it to work.

• NodeJS

You can use any version of NodeJS with your NGINX, keep in mind you might need to alter configuration snippets for it to work.

What's further possible?

File Structure

Domains are organized by folders of their names. Each domain folder contains a file called default which is responsible for that domain. Every other file in that directory is named after the subdomain it handles.

|_
|  example.com
|    |— default
|    |— subdomain1
|    |— subdomain2
|    |— subdomain3
|_
|  example2.com
|    |— default
|    |— subdomain1
|    |— subdomain2
|    |— subdomain3
|    |— [...]
|_
|   [...]

Snippets

For easy and fast configuration, there are several snippets to get you started.

Standard

File	Snippet
fastcgi-php.conf	Fastcgi bootstrap configuration
html.conf	simple HTML configuration
php.conf	simple fastcgi / PHP configuration
snakeoil.conf	development test certificate (self-signed)
spa-prerender.conf*	SPA configuration for prerendered Apps (uses cache and Node fallback)
spa.conf*	Same configuration as spa-prerender.conf but without Node fallback
static-cache.conf	simple cache configuration e.g. used in spa.conf
transparent-proxy.conf	simple proxy for loopback or local proxies, e.g. Node backends

* For these configuration snippets, there are additional SSL configuration in ssl subdirectory

SSL

File	Snippet
bootstrap.conf	Bootstraps SSL configuration for Letsencrypt
redirect-cf.conf	Redirects HTTP to HTTPS on Cloudflare or other transparent proxies
redirect.conf	Redirects HTTP to HTTPS on regular connections
spa-prerender.conf*	Shortcut for SPA-Prerender with SSL
spa.conf*	Shortcut for SPA with SSL
well-known.conf	Bootstrap of certbot for authenticating certificate requests

* These Shortcuts basically just import SSL configuration and the original snippet from above

Letsencrypt

Domains are secured by letsencrypt certificates. For this to work, we need to set up letsencrypt for our domains we want to secure and run it with the following arguments:

$ certbot certonly --email you@email.com --agree-tos --expand --webroot -w /var/letsencrypt/

To update the certificates we run

$ certbot renew

Every time we update or create certificates we need to update nginx' configuration:

$ service nginx reload

For further information about certbot and letsencrypt visit https://letsencrypt.org/