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I am trying to create soft links between config files containing server blocks in the sites-enabled and sites-available directories in /etc/nginx/.

The command I am using is:

sudo ln -s sites-available/foo.conf sites-enabled/

When I then execute:

ls -l

The result is:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 parallels parallels 27 Aug  6 20:44 immigrationinformation.conf -> immigrationinformation.conf

where the immigrationinformation.conf -> immigrationinformation.conf part has a charcoal with red typeface.

When I then try and access this soft-link, I am told that it is broken.

When I create the soft-link in the sites-available directory i.e.

sudo ln -s sites-available/foo.conf sites-available/foo_link.conf

it works as normal. However, if I then move this to the sites-enabled directory, the link is broken again.

I can create the soft link via the file manager GUI but not via the command line. I can also create hard-links with no problem.

I suspected it was a permissions issue so I have played around with setting all permissions to 777 of both directories and the directories themselves and also changing the owners to something other than root, but still with no luck.

Any help would me much appreciated, thank you.

Dan Dascalescu
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iamyojimbo
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    I know the question is already answered but i wanted to point where your mistake was, it was actually very simple, you needed to specify the file name in the second argument not the first `sudo ln -s sites-available/ sites-enabled/foo.conf` while standing inside the `/etc/nginx` directory – Mohammad AbuShady Aug 12 '13 at 09:11

4 Answers4

212

You need to start by understanding that the target of a symlink is a pathname. And it can be absolute or relative to the directory which contains the symlink

Assuming you have foo.conf in sites-available

Try

cd sites-enabled
sudo ln -s ../sites-available/foo.conf .
ls -l

Now you will have a symlink in sites-enabled called foo.conf which has a target ../sites-available/foo.conf

Just to be clear, the normal configuration for Apache is that the config files for potential sites live in sites-available and the symlinks for the enabled sites live in sites-enabled, pointing at targets in sites-available. That doesn't quite seem to be the case the way you describe your setup, but that is not your primary problem.

If you want a symlink to ALWAYS point at the same file, regardless of the where the symlink is located, then the target should be the full path.

ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/foo.conf mysimlink-whatever.conf

Here is (line 1 of) the output of my ls -l /etc/apache2/sites-enabled:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  26 Jun 24 21:06 000-default -> ../sites-available/default

See how the target of the symlink is relative to the directory that contains the symlink (it starts with ".." meaning go up one directory).

Hardlinks are totally different because the target of a hardlink is not a directory entry but a filing system Inode.

Rodney
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  • Ok I see my problem now, I thought the `ln` command would be resolving the path for me, however I now see that I just need to specify the full path of the target, or the relative path from the location on the symlink. – iamyojimbo Aug 06 '13 at 22:34
61

My site configuration file is example.conf in sites-available folder So you can create a symbolic link as

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
Bedram Tamang
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    I found the above command more intuitive because you can write above command from anywhere after you logged into terminal. And you don't have to do ```cd``` as the above path is absolute. – Bedram Tamang Jun 29 '20 at 17:41
  • You can still use a relative path for the target without having to `cd` eg `ln -s ../sites-available/example.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/` as when the symlink is resolved it neither knows nor cares where `ln` was run from. (`ln` could even be run on a different machine then the symlink copied in). The relative path (for the target) has the advantage that it remains valid if the root of the installation is moved, or is viewed from a different perspective such as inside a container vs on the container host, or inside vs outside of a `chroot` – Rodney Jul 02 '22 at 07:05
  • @Rodney my point is you need to resolve the symbolic link by yourself if you are using the relative path. sometimes`../sites-available/example.conf` path is valid, sometimes you need to do `../../sites-available/example.conf` and so on, the absolute path can be executed from anywhere, no require to resolve the path by yourself. – Bedram Tamang Jul 03 '22 at 10:41
4

You can overwrite the existing file ../sites-enabled/myproject by forcing ln like this

sudo ln -sf ../sites-available/myproject ../sites-enabled/

then

sudo service nginx restart
Atif Tariq
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2

To shorten manual typing of each conf file, you can try from sites-enabled folder:

ln -s ../sites-available/*.conf .
sudo systemctl restart nginx
embarker
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