Nginx Intro

The main folder of nginx is found under:

/etc/nginx

Check the complete folder structure (incl. subfolders):

sudo apt install tree
tree /etc/nginx/

nginx.conf

This is the main configuration file. It includes settings like logging, configuration of worker-processes and includes other configuration files.
This is the first read configuration file (from top to bottom).
Files included via include, are inserted at the location of the directive.
The scope of settings can either be: http, server, location (wide to narrow). Some settings are allowed at multiple scope level. A similair pattern applies for sites that can be general (all domains), or more narrow (specific domain). Settings in a narrow scope overwrite settings in a wider scope.
conflicting settings within the same scope are rejected, sometimes ignored (sanity check on startup). But anyhow those conflicts can be identified via nginx -t.

conf.d

Folder for configuration files. All files ending with .conf are automatically loaded by nginx. Allows better structure and delegations.

sites-available

Used for site (domain) specific configuration files (virtual hosting). Configurations in sites-available are ignored by nginx.

sites-enabled

Used to enable the sites defined in sites-available. It should contain only symlinks.

modules-available and modules-enabled

Used for nginx modules (extensions).

Configuration structure

Nginx uses following hierachical structure:

# --- main context (global) ---
user nginx;
worker_processes auto;

events {
    # --- event-context ---
    worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
    # --- HTTP-context (Webserver-Settings) ---
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    
    server {
        # --- server-context (Virtual Host / Website) ---
        listen 80;
        server_name example.com;
        root /var/www/example.com;

        location / {
            # --- location-context (URL-Handling) ---
            try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
    }
}

Document-Root

per default the document-root is defined (in nginx.conf) under:

/var/www/html/

Best-practice to generate a custom-directory within /var/www/ per domain. E.g. the website example.com would be:

/var/www/example.com/

Logging

default folder for nginx log files is:

/var/log/nginx/

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