Question

I am running a remote server on EC2 with rstudio and was looking to set up a reverse proxy as indicated in the documentation here using nginx

When I start or restart nginx i get the error message shown below. Obviously, nothing else is running on port 80. I dont have apache or any other webserver installed.

ubuntu@ip-10-4-xxx-xxx:~$ sudo fuser -k 80/tcp ; sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
Restarting nginx: nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] still could not bind()
nginx.

the module I added to ngnix.conf is the recommended snippet:

http {
  server {
    listen 80;

    location / {
      proxy_pass http://localhost:8787;
      proxy_redirect http://localhost:8787/ $scheme://$host/;
    }
  }
}

I did try using 8080 instead of 80 and ngnix starts fine, but doesn’t connect to rstudio. rstudio is meanwhile available on 8787. It feels like i am missing something really simple here. Help please!!

Answer 1

Aww snap.. Just got it after typing up the question in full. The conf file had an include that had to be commented out

include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

changed to

#include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

Works perfectly now. Somebody @rstudio please update the documentation in the link I showed above

UPDATE: Please see the response from @DirkEddelbuettel in his comment below. The right way would be to add this code snippet in an appropriate file in the “sites-enabled” directory.