Customizing Nginx Configuration in AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Question

I'm running a rails application on Ruby 2.0/Puma instances and am trying to customize the nginx configuration. I need to increase the permitted request size to allow file uploads. I've found some other posts that have lead me to add this to my .ebextensions:

files:
  "/etc/nginx/conf.d/proxy.conf" :
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      client_max_body_size 70M;

That does create the file as expected, but it doesn't seem to work until I manually restart nginx. Because of that, I've tried to figure out a way to restart nginx with .ebextensions commands, but haven't had any success. Does anyone know of a way to restart nginx with .ebextensions or know of a better approach to solving this problem?

Answer 1

I found a way to restart nginx after deployment using an undocumented technique for running post-deployment scripts. I added this to my .ebextensions:

files:
  "/opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/post/03_restart_nginx.sh":
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      #!/usr/bin/env bash
      service nginx restart

Answer 2

To reload the nginx config, you can use container_commands

From http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/elastic-beanstalk-config-files:

The container_commands key allows you to execute commands for your container. They are run after the application and web server have been set up and the application has been extracted, but before the application is deployed. container_commands are processed in lexicographical order by name.

container_commands:
  01_reload_nginx:
    command: "service nginx reload"