Customizing your Nginx configuration

Overview

Applications deployed with Cloud 66 for Rails use Nginx as their web and reverse proxy server. You can customize the default configuration of Nginx to suit your needs.

Customizing your Nginx configuration

Open the Application Overview from your Dashboard
Click on Configuration files in the Application panel on the right of the screen.
Click on the NGINX tab at the top of the main panel
Follow the CustomConfig instructions to customize the configuration.

Editing and committing your Nginx CustomConfig will perform the following steps on every web server in your application, one by one, sequentially:

Check your template for Liquid syntax errors
Count the number of cores on the server
Compile the Nginx configuration based on the information from the server
Upload the configuration to the server
Reload Nginx

Reloading Nginx does not interrupt the serving of traffic. This process will be stopped if an error is encountered. For example, if you have 3 web servers in your application, if the first server fails to be updated, the process will be halted for the other 2 servers to avoid complete service disruption.

Warning

A bad configuration may stop your Nginx from functioning, so take extra care when making changes.

Working examples

Customizing the Nginx error page

There are two ways for you to create a custom Nginx 50X error page:

1. Using a static page on you own server

Customize your Nginx configuration and replace the 50X.html location block with following:

    location = /50x.html
    {
        root /var/containers/;
    }

2. Using external static page

Upload your file to a server which is accessible from your server
Customize your Nginx configuration and replace the 50X.html location block with following:

    location = /50x.html
    {
        proxy_pass {url-of-your-custom-page};
    }

Enabling HTTP2

Nginx supports HTTP2 and this can be enabled on your application by editing your CustomConfig as follows:

Update the listen directive in the server block from this:

server {
        listen 443;
        ssl on;

…to this:

server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;

Careful

Be sure to remove the separate ssl on directive from the config, or it will not work.

Need more info?

Our Nginx CustomConfig reference guide lists all of the available variables, including boolean variables.

Need help with deployments?

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Customizing your Nginx configuration

Overview