Unable to See VirtualBox NGINX Sites

Question

I'm trying to setup several Websites on an NGINX server running under Debian Linux locally inside Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Versions: Oracle VM VirtualBox: 4.3.10, Debian: Wheezy, NGINX: 1.2.1

The /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file:

user www-data;
worker_processes 1;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
    worker_connections 768;
    # multi_accept on;
}
http {
    autoindex on;
    index index.html index.htm index.php;
    sendfile off;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 30;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;
    error_page 404 = /usr/share/nginx/www/404.html;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
    gzip on;
    gzip_disable "msie6";
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

The /etc/nginx/sites-available/default file:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
    root /usr/share/nginx/www;
    server_name vmhost;
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.htm /index.html =404;
    }
    error_page 404 /404.html;
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
   location ~* /(images|cache|media|logs|tmp)/.*\.(php|pl|py|jsp|asp|sh|cgi)$ {
      return 403;
      error_page 403 /403_error.html;
   }
    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

The /etc/nginx/sites-available/testsitea file:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name mytest;
    root /usr/share/nginx/www/testfolder/public;
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
    }
}

The symbolic links:

root@debian-nginx:/etc# ls -l /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 34 Mar 17 13:47 default -> /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Mar 25 14:30 testsitea -> /etc/nginx/sites-available/testsitea

When I send my browser to http://192.168.1.45/, I see the expected "Welcome to nginx!" If I set the browser address to http://192.168.1.45/vmhost, I also see "Welcome to nginx!"

When I direct my browser to http://192.168.1.45/mytest what I expect to see is the static index.html file of my test site. What I actually see is the "Welcome to nginx!" file.

The error.log file shows only "signal process started." I have verified that the folder permissions are set to 755 and the file permissions are 644.

Can you see where my errors are?

Answer 1

Since both your configuration files are configured to listen on the same port (80), the requests are sent to the server configuration which has default_server marked in it, which is the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default configuration whose root directory is at /usr/share/nginx/www.

To get the expected behavior, you can follow one of these options:

1. Mark the testsitea server configuration as default_server and remove the same from the default configuration file.
2. Change the listening port of testsitea configuration and try to connect to it using the specified port.
3. Add these entries in the /etc/hosts file in the system from which you are trying to connect from:

192.168.1.45 mytest

192.168.1.45 vmhost

and connect to the websites as http://mytest or http://vmhost as suggested previously by @alexeyten

Answer 2

You defined server mytest, but request page /mytest from default server.

You have to add string

192.168.1.45    mytest

to yours /etc/hosts file and point your browser to http://mytest/.