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Dynamic and Abstract Nginx

· One min read
Ayyaz Akhtar
Ayyaz Akhtar
Engineer @ Disney

Nginx is a powerful webserver and can built dynamically by injecting environment variables with envsubst and importing modular configs with the include directive.

envsubst​

input/output
  • Create /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.template with environment variables ${VAR}
  • Use envsubst to dynamically generate a new /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
# Define the environment variables
export SERVER='example' LOG='example'

# Run command to generate new nginx.conf
cd /etc/nginx
envsubst '${SERVER},${LOG}' < nginx.conf.template > nginx.conf
brew install​

Mac users will need to install gettext which includes envsubst.

brew install gettext
brew link --force gettext

Include​

From the example above using the sample http config.

* is a wildcard and will match on example.com.conf.

http {
    ...
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/example.*.conf;
    ...
}

Here is an example folder structure for your Nginx modules.

/etc/nginx/
	nginx.conf					# HTTP
	/conf.d						# Server(s)
		example.com.conf		# Can contain multiple servers
		default.conf			# Comes with nginx
		*.conf
	/sites-enabled				# Includes
		/location				# Location Includes
			assets.inc			# /location blocks to static assets
			*.inc
		/SSL					# SSL Includes
			example.com.inc		# Contains SSL directives for example.com
			*.inc
		/*						# You can continue to modularize your code base
			*.inc