nginx not starting after server reboot

Question

I've moved from a built-from-src nginx 1.2.6 installation to 1.4.1 on Ubuntu 13.04.

Installed via Ubuntu PPA, http://wiki.nginx.org/Install#Ubuntu_PPA. This all worked great.

Manually, I can reload/start/stop the service using

sudo service nginx <command>

After server reboot, nginx isn't coming up on its own.

In my previous manual installation I had a hand-written Upstart script in /etc/init that worked fine. The PPA installation has setup a /etc/init.d/ script, so I'd like to stick with the PPA methods rather than hacking something in.

It may be that because I'm not deeply familiar with the service interface that there's something I'm missing.

I've also checked /var/log/nginx/access.log and error.log and see nothing recorded during the startup process.

What should I do to fix this?

Answer 1

sudo update-rc.d nginx enable worked for me.

Answer 2

I don't have much experience with Ubuntu - but have you tried running chkconfig?

You can try:

# sudo update-rc.d nginx defaults

Or:

# sudo apt-get install chkconfig

# sudo chkconfig nginx on

Answer 3

For Ubuntu:

First check the status of it to make sure it's not erroring out

systemctl status nginx.service

It will either show an error or show it's not started

If it's not started then it needs to be enabled

sudo /etc/init.d/systemctl enable nginx
sudo reboot

Answer 4

---

UPDATE 28 March 2016

I have submitted the small improvement to the Ubuntu Upstart script, that I proposed below, as a pull request to the NGinX wiki. My pull request has been accepted and the patch has been merged.

---

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and had the same issue; NginX could start fine using sudo service nginx restart but it did not start automatically at boot up of the server.

I followed the instructions of the NGinX Ubuntu Upstart Wiki page, but it didn't work (initially). So I dug around a bit. First I found that Ubuntu did try to start NGinX at start-up but failed:

$ sudo cat /var/log/boot.log
...
* Starting nginx http daemon                                            [fail]
...

Then I found the log file of the initctl upstart jobs:

$ cat /var/log/upstart/nginx.log
...
nginx: [emerg] host not found in upstream "<mydomain>:443" in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mydomain:2
...

So, I figured out that the NGinX start up script was run before the network interface was up. This server fault answer gave me the hints I needed to fix the NginX Ubuntu Upstart script. In summary, a '!' was missing, IFACE=lo needed to be changed in to IFACE!=lo. For convenience I have pasted the complete script below:

# nginx

description "nginx http daemon"
author "George Shammas <georgyo@gmail.com>"

start on (filesystem and net-device-up IFACE!=lo)
stop on runlevel [!2345]

env DAEMON=/usr/sbin/nginx
env PID=/var/run/nginx.pid

expect fork
respawn
respawn limit 10 5
#oom never

pre-start script
        $DAEMON -t
        if [ $? -ne 0 ]
                then exit $?
        fi
end script

exec $DAEMON

After rebooting I checked if NGinX was running now:

$ sudo initctl list | grep nginx
nginx start/running, process 1551

I will notify the author of this script about my findings.

Answer 5

In addition to Visionscaper answer, nginx installed from standard trusty repos uses sysvinit service file not upstart one. Thus instead of nginx service for upstart edit rc-sysinit upstart service. It's a good idea to use upstart overrides for this:

# echo "start on (filesystem and net-device-up IFACE!=lo) or failsafe-boot" > /etc/init/rc-sysinit.override

Answer 6

For me it was because i didnt do a sudo apt-get update --fix-missing before installing sudo apt-get install nginx

Architecture: armv7l

OS: raspLITE

Answer 7

you must stop apache2 if you use it

service apache2 stop

then start ths nginx service again

service nginx start