Nginx won't restart . . . Job for nginx.service failed because the control process exited with error code

Question

I am following a youtube video on setting up Nginx I'm restarting, it gives when I got the part where I need to edit the server blocks file (sites-enabled/default) I followed exactly what they did in the video, but when saved and tried to restart:

sudo service nginx restart

I got this error: Job for nginx.service failed because the control process exited with an error code. See "systemctl status nginx.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

So I ran

systemctl status nginx.service

which gave output:

Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2018-03-02 01:36:33 EST; 10min ago

I'm running all these on an Ubuntu 16.04 Linux VPS

below is the content of the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default file:

  ##
# You should look at the following URL's in order to grasp a solid understanding
# of Nginx configuration files in order to fully unleash the power of Nginx.
# http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls
# http://wiki.nginx.org/QuickStart
# http://wiki.nginx.org/Configuration
#
# Generally, you will want to move this file somewhere, and start with a clean
# file but keep this around for reference. Or just disable in sites-enabled.
#
# Please see /usr/share/doc/nginx-doc/examples/ for more detailed examples.
##

# Default server configuration
#
server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;

    # SSL configuration
    #
    # listen 443 ssl default_server;
    # listen [::]:443 ssl default_server;
    #
    # Note: You should disable gzip for SSL traffic.
    # See: https://bugs.debian.org/773332
    #
    # Read up on ssl_ciphers to ensure a secure configuration.
    # See: https://bugs.debian.org/765782
    #
    # Self signed certs generated by the ssl-cert package
    # Don't use them in a production server!
    #
    # include snippets/snakeoil.conf;

    root /var/www/html;

    # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
    index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

    server_name x.x.x.x;

    location / {
        # First attempt to serve request as file, then
        # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
    #


/* additions i made*/


    error_page 404 /404.html;
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }
    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        try_files $uri = 404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.*\.php)(/.*)$;
        
        # With php7.0-cgi alone:
    #   fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
    #   # With php7.0-fpm:
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root $fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

/*end of additions*/



    # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
    # concurs with nginx's one
    #
    #location ~ /\.ht {
    #   deny all;
    #}
}


# Virtual Host configuration for example.com
#
# You can move that to a different file under sites-available/ and symlink that
# to sites-enabled/ to enable it.
#
#server {
#   listen 80;
#   listen [::]:80;
#
#   server_name example.com;
#
#   root /var/www/example.com;
#   index index.html;
#
#   location / {
#       try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
#   }
#}

EDIT: They used php5.6 in the video but I am using PHP 7.0 if this is helpful

Answer 1

Something's wrong

Set up error logging to debug by editing /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:
find line with error_log, verify log file location and change the level to debug:
error_log logs/error.log debug;

Try restarting again and inspect the log file for more details.