Wildcard vhosts on Nginx

Question

I've just installed Nginx on my server and am extremely happy with the results, however I still cannot figure out how to insert wildcard virtual hosts.

This is the [directory] structure I'd like:

-- public_html (example.com)
---subdoamin 1 (x.example.com)
---subdomain 2 (y.example.com)

As you can see it's pretty basic, however, I'd like the ability to add domains by simply adding an A record for a new subdomain, which will instantly point to the subdirectory of the same name under public_html.

There's stuff on the web, however I haven't come across something exactly like this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I shall show you.

The configuration file

server {
  server_name example.com www.example.com;
  root www/pub;
}

server {
  server_name ~^(.*)\.example\.com$ ;
  root www/pub/$1;
}

Test files

We have two test files:

$ cat www/pub/index.html 
COMMON

$ cat www/pub/t/index.html 
T

Testing

Static server names:

$ curl -i -H 'Host: example.com' http://localhost/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.8.54
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:00:42 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 7
Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:56:24 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Accept-Ranges: bytes

COMMON

$ curl -i -H 'Host: www.example.com' http://localhost/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.8.54
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:00:48 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 7
Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:56:24 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Accept-Ranges: bytes

COMMON

And regexp server name:

$ curl -i -H 'Host: t.example.com' http://localhost/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.8.54
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:00:54 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 2
Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:56:40 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Accept-Ranges: bytes

T

Answer 2

This Nginx configuration file below allows for wildcard hostnames that dynamically route to the corresponding folder in /var/www/vhost/ while also dynamically generating the respective log files.

http://test1.wildcard.com → /var/www/vhost/test1
                                                   /var/log/nginx/test1.wildcard.com-access.log                                                    /var/log/nginx/test1.wildcard.com-error.log

http://test2.wildcard.com → /var/www/vhost/test2
                                                   /var/log/nginx/test2.wildcard.com-access.log                                                    /var/log/nginx/test2.wildcard.com-error.log

wildcard.conf

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;

  #  Match everything except dot and store in $subdomain variable
  #  Matches test1.wildcard.com, test1-demo.wildcard.com
  #  Ignores sub2.test1.wildcard.com
  server_name ~^(?<subdomain>[^.]+).wildcard.com;

  root /var/www/vhost/$subdomain;

  access_log /var/log/nginx/$host-access.log;
  error_log  /var/log/nginx/$host-error.log;
}

Answer 3

This is how I've handled Virtual Hosts with Nginx:

server_name ~^(?<vhost>.*)$;
root /srv/www/$vhost;
access_log /var/log/nginx/$vhost.access.log;

I'm not sure why Wildcard Subdomains in a Parent Folder is so wrong/misleading.