CODEWITHSUNDEEP
nginx
Nikhil Baliga
Nikhil Baliga

Reputation: 1341

Add nginx config on the fly

I am building a multi-tenant application where requests to multiple domains have to be serviced by the same nginx server.

In order to achieve this, a script creates nginx configs for each domain after a registration process and adds them into a folder. The base nginx configuration has been setup to read configs from this folder.

If I manually restart nginx using sudo service nginx restart the application works fine. However, I am looking for this to happen without a manual intervention. i.e. I want my script to refresh nginx config and I want to do it without entering a sudo password again.

Can someone help me achieve this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3267

Answers (1)

LittleBoxOfSunshine
LittleBoxOfSunshine

Reputation: 344

I would strongly discourage using service ngnix restartto reload configs, especially in a multi-tenant environment. You risk interrupting ongoing requests, sessions, etc. That's potentially fine, but each tenant had to make that determination and has to do so at appropriate times. Nginx supports the command service ngnix reload to address this concern. Reload allows for configs to be reloaded without any downtime.

You could trigger the command at least 3 ways:

  1. Periodic cron job (easiest to setup, least efficient)
  2. Manually triggering the command
  3. Trigger through filesystem monitoring

Option 2 would be good if, for example, you had some web interface that allows a tenant to modify a config and you know to manually trigger the command or to send a message to some other service that triggers it. You could avoid using sudo securely by granting the web application the ability to run a single command as root e.g. vi sudo and add the line www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/service nginx reload where www-data should be whatever user your application runs under. Then you can just execute the shell command according to whatever api is appropriate for the language you are using.

Option 3 would be the most robust. There all several options for monitoring the filesystem but I would recommend incron. Here's a guide to install and configure incron. You could monitor changes to whichever directory you store configs in and use service nginx reload in place of the example command in the tutorial.

Upvotes: 2

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