Nginx: How to setup multiple virtual hosts (server blocks) on different subdomains?

Question

EDIT:

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Ok, very strange still. It seems that it does not work on my main browser. In incognito browsers or just a completely new chrome window the sites now do work. I guess it has something to do with browser caching?

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So I am hosting my website on Digital Ocean and I want to host multiple 'websites' on 1 droplet/server. By multiple websites, I mean different subdomains of my main domain. So I want to host admin.domain.com, dev.domain.com and test.domain.com on the same server. I followed this tutorial, but it is not working like expected. Currently, only 1 subdomain of the 3 is working...

What have I tried so far?

First of, I created 3 A records in my DNS all pointing to the same server_ip droplet on Digital Ocean.

I've created a different a different folder for each subdomain in the /var/www folder, each containing a html folder with a simple index.html file and some html:

The image above shows my /var/www folder.

I then used the following command sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www.

Next, I copied the default server block file and used this as the default for a new server block with the following command:

sudo cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/admin.domain.nl

I changed the contents of the file in all 3 config files for the 3 subdomains to the following (obviously changing the root to the specific subdomain aswell as the server_name):

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        root /var/www/admin.domain.nl/html;

        # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name admin.domain.nl;

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

I then used the following command: sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/dev.domain.nl /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ 3 times for the 3 different subdomains to 'enable' the server blocks.

This is my sites-enabled folder:

I've had no syntax errors and thus restarted nginx with: sudo systemctl restart nginx.

The problem

Now, for some very odd reason I do not understand, only the admin.domain.nl site is working. The other 2 subdomains simply display: This site can’t be reached.

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

IN /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

http {

    # ...........................others contents.....................................

    # in bottom
    
    server {
        listen 80;
        root /var/www/html/cmp/api;
        server_name "cmpapi.localhost";
        index index.html index.php;
        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ $uri.html $uri.php =404;
        }
    }

    server {
        listen 80;
        root /var/www/html/cmp/frontend;
        server_name "cmp.localhost";
        index index.html index.php;
        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ $uri.html $uri.php =404;
        }
    }

}

1. Here my project name is cmp. here 2 project
   1. one is react frontend
   2. another is laravel api project
2. Here 2 folder created in
   1. /var/www/html/cmp/api
      • This assigned to http://cmpapi.localhost (server_name)
   2. /var/www/html/cmp/frontend
      • This assigned to http://cmp.localhost (server_name)

cmd

sudo find /var/www/html/cmp/frontend/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;  
sudo find /var/www/html/cmp/frontend/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;  

sudo find /var/www/html/cmp/api/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
sudo find /var/www/html/cmp/api/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;  

systemctl reload nginx 

Browser

• http://cmpapi.localhost
• http://cmp.localhost

Answer 2

Any secure encryption scheme will do what you're describing. Since it sounds like both sides of the system are on servers you control (rather than in the client), that's straightforward. Create a random key and share it between the two servers, use AES-GCM to encrypt and decrypt the result, and base64-encode the encrypted data to transfer.

There are other secure encryption schemes, but AES-GCM is the easiest to use correctly for this kind of problem.