Why is my second site in nginx.conf not working? - nginx

Question

I have a local NginX testing server on my Windows 10 machine. This is just for creating and testing websites, it is not served to the internet.
I've been testing one site successfully at localhost for a while, but now I want to add a second test site. I thought I could achieve this by duplicating the server{} block in the nginx.conf file and changing the name of the server_name and a few other parameters, but that it doesn't seem to work. When I try to load my second test site in Chrome, I get this error:
This site can’t be reached
local_test_2’s server DNS address could not be found.
My site at localhost still works, though.
Why is my second test site not working?
Here's my current nginx.conf file:
worker_processes 1;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include mime.types;
default_type text/html;
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
server {
#Server basics
server_name localhost;
listen 80;
index index.html index.php;
root c:/nginx/html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?_url=$uri&$query_string;
}
location ~ .(php|htm|html)$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME c:/nginx/html/$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
server {
#Server basics
server_name local_test_2;
listen 80;
index index.html index.php;
root "C:\Users\User Name\Documents\Test\example.com";
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?_url=$uri&$query_string;
}
location ~ .(php|htm|html)$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME c:/nginx/html/$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
}
Update:
My C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file has the following:
# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost
The current 'localhost' specification is commented out. Should I change this file?

Answer 1

You need to add local_test_2 in your windows host file: at
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
In host file add below line at the last
127.0.0.1 local_test_2
Also you can check reference to setup new host in nginx at: Setting up Nginx on local machine

Answer 2

The local_test_2 is a url that you created for testing purpose. Since you didn't buy it from some registrar, no DNS provider will be able to resolve the url to the ip address.
Every operating system has a hosts file(in linux it will be /etc/hosts) which can be used to map the urls to ip address without the use of some online DNS service. So in your case you can append the following line,
127.0.0.1 local_test_2
which tells to route all requests to local_test_2 to the same machine(127.0.0.1). No other changes are required in the hosts file.
Refer this link for more details on hosts files and different files used in different operating systems.