Nginx works as a front end server, which in this case proxies the requests to a node.js server. Therefore you need to setup an nginx config file for node.
This is what I have done in my Ubuntu box:
Create the file yourdomain.com
at /etc/nginx/sites-available/
:
vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com
In it you should have something like:
# the IP(s) on which your node server is running. I chose port 3000.
upstream app_yourdomain {
server 127.0.0.1:3000;
keepalive 8;
}
# the nginx server instance
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/yourdomain.com.log;
# pass the request to the node.js server with the correct headers
# and much more can be added, see nginx config options
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
proxy_pass http://app_yourdomain/;
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
If you want nginx (>= 1.3.13) to handle websocket requests as well, add the following lines in the location /
section:
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
Once you have this setup you must enable the site defined in the config file above:
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com yourdomain.com
Create your node server app at /var/www/yourdomain/app.js
and run it at localhost:3000
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(3000, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:3000/');
Test for syntax mistakes:
nginx -t
Restart nginx:
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
Lastly start the node server:
cd /var/www/yourdomain/ && node app.js
Now you should see "Hello World" at yourdomain.com
One last note with regards to starting the node server: you should use some kind of monitoring system for the node daemon. There is an awesome tutorial on node with upstart and monit.
I had the exact same problem - I was running my nginx in Virtualbox. I did not have caching turned on. But looks like sendfile
was set to on
in nginx.conf
and that was causing the problem. @kolbyjack mentioned it above in the comments.
When I turned off sendfile
- it worked fine.
This is because:
Sendfile is used to ‘copy data between one file descriptor and another‘ and apparently has some real trouble when run in a virtual machine environment, or at least when run through Virtualbox. Turning this config off in nginx causes the static file to be served via a different method and your changes will be reflected immediately and without question
It is related to this bug: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12597
Best Answer
Change this line:
To be this:
Note the addition of
application/javascript
andtext/javascript
to your list of gzip types.There are also more details—and a more expansive list of gzip types—in the answer posted here.