nginx directive is not allowed here in unicorn's example nginx.conf

Question

I'm using nginx 1.4.1. After copying unicorn's example of nginx.conf, I found out the settings must be moved to different directives. I still couldn't manage to place the following settings in the nginx.conf file: worker_processes, user, pid and events block. When I place them as it is now, the log shows directive is not allowed here. What should I fix?

worker_processes 1;
user deployer sudo; # for systems with a "nogroup"
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events {
  worker_connections 1024; # increase if you have lots of clients
  accept_mutex off; # "on" if nginx worker_processes > 1
}

upstream abc {
  ...
}

server {
  ...
}

Update 1

I know about this post, but it's weird that whatever I am doing is not working. I couldn't find any docs in nginx.

Answer 1

The original example cannot be used directly, because the main configuration is at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. /etc/nginx/nginx.conf has http directives, which includes the sites-enabled/* directives. The only changes to be made on /etc/nginx/nginx.conf are:

work_processes 4;
worker_connections 1024;

Also, remove text/html from it because it's already gzipped by default.

The end result of your nginx.conf in your app should have no http directives, just upstream and server.