Nginx – programmatic interface to nginx configuration

nginx

I am using nginx as a load balancer in front of my web server instances. I run 4 instances of the web server and spread the traffic equally across them using nginx. When I am deploying new version – I change the nginx.conf and mark first 2 of the 4 servers down, then restart nginx. I update the server code and restart the first 2 servers. Then I edit nginx.conf to indicate that the first 2 servers are up and mark the other 2 down, again restart nginx. Then I update and restart other two instances. Again update the nginx.conf marking all servers up and final restart of nginx.

I have to do this process multiple times on some days. Manually performing the above steps every time turns out to be error prone.

Is there a programmatic access to nginx/nginx.conf so that I can automate this process?

[The only way I imagine right now is to write above steps in shell script]

Best Answer

No, nginx does not have a configuration API.

Although there are cases when you might need to manually mark servers as down, generally configuring proxy_next_upstream + fail_timeout will work.

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Nginx – Adding websites to nginx without restarting nginx

/etc/init.d/nginx reload

should reload your nginx config without restarting nginx or making current sites go down

that said, an nginx restart is normally a lot less than 30 seconds so I would be surprised if that was such a big problem

Nginx – multiple servers configuration

As others have noted, nginx doesn't support that.

On possibility might be to make use of separate config files for each of the individual hosts and have the nginx startup script reference that config file directly.

Method 1: multiple config files

/etc/init.d/nginx would do something like:

MyIP=`# some code to get my ip address or local ID`
nginx -c $PATH_TO_NGINX/${MyIP}.conf

In this manner, you are rsync'ing out the same files out to everyone, but each server will only reference their own config file.

Method 2: dynamically update the config file on service start/restart

MyIP=`# some code to get my ip address or local ID`
updateconfig($MyIP,$TEMPLATECONFIG,$LOCALCONFIG) # Some function which will take a template config distributed out and replace the IP-PLACEHOLDERS with the box's actual IP address
nginx -c $PATH_TO_NGINX/$LOCALCONFIG

In this manner, you only manage one config file template which self-updates on a restart/reload.

If you don't need the additional complexity of Puppet/config management yet, this is a low-overhead way to go, and because the config is dynamic, still allows you to scale out without worrying about the box's ip address. But if your architecture changes, then config management will be very helpful.

Best Answer

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Nginx – Adding websites to nginx without restarting nginx

Nginx – multiple servers configuration

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