Customizing Nginx Configuration in AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Question

I'm running a rails application on Ruby 2.0/Puma instances and am trying to customize the nginx configuration. I need to increase the permitted request size to allow file uploads. I've found some other posts that have lead me to add this to my .ebextensions:

files:
  "/etc/nginx/conf.d/proxy.conf" :
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      client_max_body_size 70M;

That does create the file as expected, but it doesn't seem to work until I manually restart nginx. Because of that, I've tried to figure out a way to restart nginx with .ebextensions commands, but haven't had any success. Does anyone know of a way to restart nginx with .ebextensions or know of a better approach to solving this problem?

Answer 1

I found a way to restart nginx after deployment using an undocumented technique for running post-deployment scripts. I added this to my .ebextensions:

files:
  "/opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/post/03_restart_nginx.sh":
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      #!/usr/bin/env bash
      service nginx restart

Answer 2

To reload the nginx config, you can use container_commands

From http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/elastic-beanstalk-config-files:

The container_commands key allows you to execute commands for your container. They are run after the application and web server have been set up and the application has been extracted, but before the application is deployed. container_commands are processed in lexicographical order by name.

container_commands:
  01_reload_nginx:
    command: "service nginx reload"

Answer 3

I might be a little late with the response here, but I've discovered another, less intrusive way to configure nginx on Elastic Beanstalk. You can specify configuration files for nginx directly by creating an .ebextensions/nginx/conf.d directory. Any config files found inside are automatically copied to your /etc/nginx/conf.d/ directory during the EB deployment. This seems to be a more robust solution.

Documentation available here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/java-se-nginx.html

EDIT: As pointed out in comments, Elastic Beanstalk has inconsistent implementations between platforms. The documentation here is for Java SE, and it appears this documentation is not relevant for all platforms.

Answer 4

this is my configuration and worked for me. You have to include it inside of the http block.

files:
  "/etc/nginx/conf.d/proxy.conf" :
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
        http {
          client_max_body_size 20M;
        }

Answer 5

I got it working like this. No need to restart or reload nginx since the commands (and not container_commands) runes BEFORE the application deploy.

commands: 
  01-get-nginx-conf-file:
    command: "aws s3 cp s3://somepath/nginx.conf /home/ec2-user"
  02-replace-default-nginx-config:
    command: "cp /home/ec2-user/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf"