NAME

nginx — HTTP and reverse proxy server, mail proxy server

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

nginx (pronounced “engine x”) is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail 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.

-g directives

Set global configuration directives. See EXAMPLES for details.

-p prefix

Set the prefix path. The default value is /var/www.

-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

Don't run, just test the configuration file. nginx checks the configuration file syntax and then tries to open any files referred to in the configuration file.

-u

By default nginx will chroot(2) to the home directory of the user running the daemon, typically “www”, or to the home directory of user in nginx.conf. The -u option disables this behaviour, and returns nginx to the original "unsecure" behaviour.

-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's 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.

DEBUGGING LOG

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

and then set the debug level of the error_log:

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

events {
	debug_connection 127.0.0.1;
}

FILES

/var/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/www/logs/error.log

Error log file.

EXIT STATUS

The nginx utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

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;"

SEE ALSO

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

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

HISTORY

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

AUTHORS

Igor Sysoev <‍igor@sysoev.ru>.

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