Nginx – How to set a favicon.ico for a specific Virtual Host on Nginx

faviconnginxvirtualhost

I am using Nginx as my webserver for the first time. I didn't have any trouble to set it up and everything works great. The problem came when the designer asked me if he could send me "the icon in the title bar" to "put it up there".

# /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
...
server {
    listen 80 ;
    server_name *.website.com website.com;
    root /home/webuser/sites/website;
}

My directory:

/home/webuser/sites/website/
|_ index.html
|_ main.css
|_ favicon.ico

Is it possible to put a specific favicon.ico to each Virtual Host? Where should you put that file and how can you configure it?

EDIT:

I just realized that it was a completely different problem. Both answers were right but my problem was the permission. I don't know why the file favicon.ico ended up having permissions 600 and of course the moment I did:

chmod +r favicon.ico

Worked like a charm. I will leave this here if it happens to someone else.

Best Answer

favicon.ico file should be placed in website root directory which is defined by nginx root directive. Or you could pass URL to favicon by using following code in HTML:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/myicon.ico" />

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Turn out my first answer to this question was correct at certain time, but it turned into another pitfall - to stay up to date please check Taxing rewrite pitfalls

I have been corrected by many SE users, so the credit goes to them, but more importantly, here is the correct code:

server {
       listen         80;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen         443 ssl;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       # add Strict-Transport-Security to prevent man in the middle attacks
       add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" always; 

       [....]
}

Nginx – Trouble with nginx and serving from multiple directories under the same domain

The root directive is the problem here. Quote from the doc:

note: Keep in mind that the root will still append the directory to the request so that a request for "/i/top.gif" will not look in "/spool/w3/top.gif" like might happen in an Apache-like alias configuration where the location match itself is dropped. Use the alias directive to achieve the Apache-like functionality.

Basically, only use root for real roots: if the content is to be at / use root. If it's going to end on a subfolder, use alias:

location  /map/ {
  alias  /home/user/public_html/map/;
}

Also check what user nginx is running as and make sure that this user can access /home/user/public_html/map

Best Answer

Related Solutions

NGINX Redirect – How to Rewrite All HTTP Requests to HTTPS While Maintaining Sub-Domain

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Nginx – Trouble with nginx and serving from multiple directories under the same domain

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