nginx: create directory if it doesn't exist

Question

I'm new to nginx and I have a given nginx config. There is a mapping like:

map $http_host $my_customer {
  default "default";
  "~*cust1" "cust1";
  "~*cust2" "cust2";
}

And there is the access_log line:

access_log /my/log/path/access.log

Now I want to have separate log-directories and log-files for each customer, so I changed the access_log line into:

access_log /my/log/path/$my_customer/access.log

This works fine if the $my_customer-directory already exists. But if it doesn't exist, then nginx does not log. I know how I can check if the directory exists:

if (!-d /my/log/path/$my_customer) {}

But how is it possible to create a directory inside the nginx config file?

Answer 1

In order to start nginx process all directories have to be created in advance.
The owner of dir should be the user used by worker processes defined in nginx configuration file (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf by default).
The user should have write permissions to this directory.

As @Alexey Ten noticed, it is a good practice to use default logs location: /var/log/nginx/$my_customer.access.log

Otherwise, you have to do something like that:
mkdir -p -m 755 /my/log/path/$my_customer