Nginx default host when not defined

My recommendation is to remove the default site by removing the symlink in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled:

$ sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Then create your desired configuration in a new file, call it /etc/nginx/sites-available/your.host.name. Assuming you have your home page at /var/www/your.host.name, here's a very simple example:

server {
        listen 80;
        server_name your.host.name;

        location / {
                root   /var/www/your.host.name;
                index  index.html;
        }
}

Then create a symlink in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled:

$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/your.host.name /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/your.host.name

Finally, restart nginx:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Good luck.

If you have installed the nginx package from the Ubuntu repositories, you will have two directories.

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled and /etc/nginx/sites-available.

In the main nginx configuration, /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, you have the following line:

include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf;

So basically to list all available virtualhosts, you can run the following command:

ls /etc/nginx/sites-available

To activate one of them, run the following command:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.example.org.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

The scripts that comes with Apache is basically just simple shell wrappers that does something similar as above.

After linking the files, remember to run sudo service nginx reload/ service nginx reload