When do we need to use http block in nginx config file?

Question

I am reading nginx beginner's tutorial, on the section Serving Static Content they have

http {   server {   } } 

but when I add an http block I get the error

[emerg] "http" directive is not allowed here …

When I remove the http block and change the conf file to this, it works fine:

server {     listen 80 default_server;     listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;      root /var/example.com/html;     index index.html index.htm;      # make site accessible from http://localhost/     server_name localhost      location / {       try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;   } 

I suspect that I am missing something simple, but why do they use http to serve static files?

Answer 1

Your doing fine. I guess you are editing /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default (or the linked file at /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.

This is the standard nginx set up. It is configured with /etc/nginx/nginx.conf which contains the http {} statement. This in turn contains an "include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*" line to include your file above with server{ } clause in it.

Note that if you are using an editor that creates a backup file, you must modify the include statement to exclude the backup files, or you will get some "interesting" errors! My line is

include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*[a-zA-Z]  

which will not pick up backup files ending in a tilde. YMMV.