Nginx status endpoint running inside Docker

Question

I'm new to Nginx, which I'm running in a Docker container to serve a simple website. I want to add an /health endpoint that simply returns status 200 + some arbitrary content.

I copied and adjusted the standard nginx.conf from /etc/nginx/ by adding

server {
    location /health {
        return 200 "alive";
    }
}

at the bottom inside the http block. But when I run the Docker, and try to access localhost/health, I just get no such file or directory. Accessing the website at localhost works fine.

I also tried copying other code blocks, e.g., this one: https://gist.github.com/dhrrgn/8650077 But then I get conflicting server name "" on 0.0.0.0:80, ignored nginx: [warn] conflicting server name "" on 0.0.0.0:80, ignored.

Am I placing the location at a wrong location inside nginx.conf? Do I need some special server configuration? What's the problem?

Answer 1

The problem was with my Nginx Docker setup/configuration: I am using nginx:alpine, which has the configuration files at /etc/nginx/conf.d/. There, default.conf defines the default configuration of Nginx. So, I had to remove default.conf and copy my configuration there instead. In the Dockerfile:

COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/nginx.conf
RUN rm /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Of course, I also had to define the standard route in nginx.conf then:

server {
    location / {
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }

    location /health {
        return 200 'alive';
        add_header Content-Type text/plain;
    }
}