nginx-config

These files exist at /usr/local/etc/freshports/ and are installed by the freshports-www package. Each file is installed with a .sample suffix so as to not overwrite any existing cofiguration on upgrades.

Separate files are used to avoid duplicating the same content in multiple places. I know some claim this makes the configuration more complex. For me, it keeps thing simple.

How do I use this?

My nginx.conf file contains this line:

include /usr/local/etc/nginx/includes/*.conf;

This pulls in any files which match that glob. In my case, I pull in only *.conf files from that directory.

In that directory, a single symlink is created which links to the configuration file.

[dan@dev-nginx01:/usr/local/etc/nginx/includes] $ ls -l
total 1
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  37 Aug  4 04:24 freshports.org.conf -> /usr/local/etc/freshports/vhosts.conf
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  55 Jan 26  2019 freshsource.org.conf -> /usr/home/dan/src/freshsource/configuration/vhosts.conf
[dan@dev-nginx01:/usr/local/etc/nginx/includes] $

vhosts.conf

This is the file included by nginx - it is usually symlinked to a file in the Nginx includes directory (/usr/local/etc/nginx/includes`).

Ideally, this is the only file which contains host-specific details such as:

IP address
server_name
SSL certificate keys
redirects from http to https

virtualhost-common.conf

The directives in this file are website-specific but not host-specific.

By website, I mean FreshPorts.

By host-specific, I refer to dev.freshports.org, test.freshports.org, stage.freshports.org, etc. These are the different hosts which run FreshPorts. These directives are the same on every host.

virtualhost-common-ssl.conf

This specifies the SSL settings.

In theory, this file could be used by all the virtual hosts on this web server. It contains no host-specific settings (such as IP address, location, or server_name).

php-processing.conf

This contains the directives for invoking PHP.

Things under consideration

You will notice that vhosts.conf contains a server entry for both freshports.org and www.freshports.org both of which are running ssl.

I don't know why. I don't know why I don't have one server_name with both host names. That's what is done with the http host at the top of the file.