Skip to content

Configure nginx

Configuring nginx for CEDAR would involve a huge amount of editing.

Because of this, we provide ready-made config files that you will need to put in the proper place, and link them under the main nginx configuration.

Please follow these steps, and try to familiarize with the config file meaning.

nginx

Once configured, nginx will work without any further intervention. However, it will be useful to understand what it actually does for CEDAR.

nginx config

The way of configuring nginx for CEDAR could be regarded as not totally aligning with the nginx-way (custom directory holding the configs).

However, we decided to go this way for the readability and maintainability.

Create geo module config

This module is meant to be used for geolocation configuration. We use it in CEDAR to set boolean variable that later will have an effect on the main configuration. 

cp ${CEDAR_DEVELOP_HOME}/os-mirror/development-macos/usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/module-geo.inc.conf \
  /usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/.

Create ssl include config

Each subdomain served by nginx communicates through https. To do so, they need the private and public keys for the given domain. We are using a single certificate that takes advantage of the SAN feature of the certificates.

We would need to include the same two lines in the config of each subdomain. To prevent this, we describe the ssl config in one include file, which we reference from each subdomain config. 

cp ${CEDAR_DEVELOP_HOME}/os-mirror/development-macos/usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/include-ssl.conf \
  /usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/.

Create subdomain config files

These files will configure the available subdomains one by one: 

cp ${CEDAR_DEVELOP_HOME}/os-mirror/development-macos/usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/frontend-*.conf \
  /usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/
cp ${CEDAR_DEVELOP_HOME}/os-mirror/development-macos/usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/server-*.conf \
  /usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/

Create global settings for CEDAR domains

This config contains global settings:

cp ${CEDAR_DEVELOP_HOME}/os-mirror/development-macos/usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/config-cedar-global.inc.conf \
  /usr/local/etc/nginx/cedar/

Replace main nginx config file

At this step, we are replacing the factory default nginx.conf with one that serves purely CEDAR purposes.

If you had nginx running before, possibly with a custom config, please merge your config, and the one mentioned here.

cp ${CEDAR_DEVELOP_HOME}/os-mirror/development-macos/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf \
  /usr/local/etc/nginx/.
Important

Please observe, that the nginx config files do not contain any variable interpolation. This is due to nginx intentionally not supporting this easily (you need to configure it once painfully, but it will run fast forever).

If for some reason your CEDAR_HOME is not /Users/cedar-dev/CEDAR/, please replace this value in all the config files with the proper value from your system.

The same applies to CEDAR_HOST. If you are not configuring for metadatacenter.orgx, please replace this value in your config files as well.