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soapergem
Asked: 2015-04-16 08:32:55 +0800 CST

How can I get Nginx to listen on all host names instead of specific ones?

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This is a part of my /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file. (I've modified it here slightly as to not disclose the actual IP address or DNS entry, but you get the idea.)

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name ec2-52-1-2-3.compute-1.amazonaws.com;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://thumbor;
    }
}
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name 52.1.2.3;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://thumbor;
    }
}

I've also got an upstream section for thumbor, based on this guide. And this works; I can access it via http://ec2-52-1-2-3.compute-1.amazonaws.com/... or via http://52.1.2.3/...

However I feel that it's a little bit fragile the way it's set up right now. What if the IP address changes? Or what if the DNS entry changes? I would prefer if it would simply respond to all requests on port 80, regardless of the hostname.

So naturally I tried doing this instead:

server {
    listen 80;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://thumbor;
    }
}

As you can see all I did there was pare it down to a single server section instead of two, and I removed the server_name variable from that section. But rather than responding to all requests like I hoped, it no longer responded to any. It would 404 on everything.

How can I set up a generic server listener like I'm describing here?

nginx

2 Answers

  1. No need for regular expressions. You can do it by appending default_server to your listen directive, like so: listen 80 default_server;. This points to the configuration which is to be applied if a request is directed at server IP but no hostname is matching.

    • 2

  2. Wait... I figured it out, after realizing that you can use regular expressions. I ended up doing this as my single server section:

    server {
    listen 80;
    server_name ~^.+$;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://thumbor;
    }
}
    • 1