Running and Stopping Nginx

Be sure to configure nginx first.

Starting Nginx

1. nginx may not be in your path. Test with ‘which’:

$ which nginx

2. If it says ‘no nginx in…’ then nginx is most likely in /usr/local/nginx/sbin. If you like, you can add this to your path, or use the full path (/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx) instead of just ‘nginx’ in the command below

3. Start nginx:

$ nginx -c ~/etc/nginx.conf

4. Test your site (your Mongrel instances will also need to be started)

5. If it works correctly, add the nginx & mongrel commands to your rc.local

Killing nginx

Nginx doesn’t have a nice way to shut down, so you have to use Unix’s kill command to stop it. Of course, you need to know the PID of the nginx process.

So, here’s a confusing one liner that you can copy & paste into your ssh session that will kill any nginx processes you have running:

$ ps x | awk '/[^\]]nginx: m/ {print $1}' | xargs kill

Or try this, it’s easier (-v for verbose, -i for ask you nicely):

$ killall -u $USER -v -i nginx

More generally, you can look up the PIDs of the nginx master processes (when you kill a master process, all the worker processes die as well) using ps x and then kill them yourself using kill 7777 (for a PID of 7777).