nginx: [emerg] “http” directive is not allowed here in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default:1

Question

I\'m new to NGINX and I\'m trying to setup minimal working thing. So I trying to run aiohttp mini-app with nginx and supervisor (by this example). But I can\'t configure Ngi

Answer 1

I've been having similar issue. I needed to include upstream directive but I could't touch the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file where the http directive is defined. The only thing I could do was to replace /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf (cloud/kubernetes automation stuff...)

The solution is quite simple but since it might not be obvious (wasn't to me), here is how you can write your /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf file if you need to include upstream spec. (upstream and server directives are not enclosed by anything in this file)

/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

upstream api {
    server ...;
}

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         example.com;
    ...

    location / {
        proxy_pass      http://api;
        ...
    }
}