OSX 10.8 Server and nginx: how to get nginx sites to show up side by side?

Question

I use both of these for development. nginx is our work setup, and I used to use websharing for dealing with localhost development of sites with faux dns (e.g. hostname.dev). 10.8 removes websharing and makes you use the server app (e.g. 10.8 Server). Download and run that, but now, when I turn off the websites tab in server, it intercepts all calls to :80 and says "turn on the web server. If I do, it's then hitting apache, and not nginx.

Is there a way to get these to play nice side by side or am I simply up a creek?

Answer 1

You need to shut off apache. Not just kill the process. Lauchd needs to be edited to not start apache at all in the first place.

For more info on that take a look at this page.

Answer 2

It turns out that Apache does NOT stop when you turn off websites in the UI. So, kill those processes manually to get port 80 freed from apache and available for nginx.