nginx - Man Page

• Start server with the default configuration file: nginx

• Start server with a custom configuration file: nginx -c configuration_file

• Start server with a prefix for all relative paths in the configuration file: nginx -c configuration_file -p prefix/for/relative/paths

• Test the configuration without affecting the running server: nginx -t

• Reload the configuration by sending a signal with no downtime: nginx -s reload

tldr.sh

nginx (pronounced “engine x”) is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server. It is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

The options are as follows:

-?, -h

Print help.

-c file

Use an alternative configuration file.

-e file

Use an alternative error log file. Special value stderr indicates that the standard error output should be used.

-g directives

Set global configuration directives. See Examples for details.

-p prefix

Set the prefix path. The default value is /usr/share/nginx.

-q

Suppress non-error messages during configuration testing.

-s signal

Send a signal to the master process. The argument signal can be one of: stop, quit, reopen, reload. The following table shows the corresponding system signals:

stop

SIGTERM

quit

SIGQUIT

reopen

SIGUSR1

reload

SIGHUP

-T

Same as -t, but additionally dump configuration files to standard output.

-t

Do not run, just test the configuration file. nginx checks the configuration file syntax and then tries to open files referenced in the configuration file.

-V

Print the nginx version, compiler version, and configure script parameters.

-v

Print the nginx version.

The master process of nginx can handle the following signals:

SIGINT, SIGTERM

Shut down quickly.

SIGHUP

Reload configuration, start the new worker process with a new configuration, and gracefully shut down old worker processes.

SIGQUIT

Shut down gracefully.

SIGUSR1

Reopen log files.

SIGUSR2

Upgrade the nginx executable on the fly.

SIGWINCH

Shut down worker processes gracefully.

While there is no need to explicitly control worker processes normally, they support some signals too:

SIGTERM

Shut down quickly.

SIGQUIT

Shut down gracefully.

SIGUSR1

Reopen log files.

To enable a debugging log, reconfigure nginx to build with debugging:

./configure --with-debug ...

and then set the debug level of the error_log:

error_log /path/to/log debug;

It is also possible to enable the debugging for a particular IP address:

events {
	debug_connection 127.0.0.1;
}

The NGINX environment variable is used internally by nginx and should not be set directly by the user.

/run/nginx.pid

Contains the process ID of nginx. The contents of this file are not sensitive, so it can be world-readable.

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

The main configuration file.

/var/log/nginx/error.log

Error log file.

Exit status is 0 on success, or 1 if the command fails.

Test configuration file ~/mynginx.conf with global directives for PID and quantity of worker processes:

nginx -t -c ~/mynginx.conf \
	-g "pid /var/run/mynginx.pid; worker_processes 2;"

Documentation at http://nginx.org/en/docs/.

For questions and technical support, please refer to http://nginx.org/en/support.html.

Development of nginx started in 2002, with the first public release on October 4, 2004.

Igor Sysoev <igor@sysoev.ru>.

This manual page was originally written by Sergey A. Osokin <osa@FreeBSD.org.ru> as a result of compiling many nginx documents from all over the world.

pmdanginx(1), public-inbox-daemon(8).