Difference between socket- and port-based connection to outer NGINX?

installation
9

Yes, the error is on a client machine. Okay, then I suspect the problem is with my /etc/nginx/sites-available/default. For the time being I set it to listen to port 81:

server {
        listen 81 default_server;
        listen [::]:81 default_server;
        server_name 88.99.**.** mydomain.net www.mydomain.net;

In my mind, this should imply that /etc/nginx/sites-available/default will not interfere with the settings in discourse.conf and indeed: if I change the defauklt server to port 80, I get the BGINX welcome page instead of ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED.

So maybe my discourse.conf is simply not being included in the nginx.conf? That would also explain why NGINX din’t complain about the extra }… And indeed, I had my discourse.conf in the wrong path (sites-available instead of sites-enabled).

But when I fixed that, I saw the NGINX welcome page even when calling test.mydomain.net. So, for lack of other ideas, I tried starting the conainer but uit said it was already started. So I stopped and re-started it and now I’m getting 502 bad gateway.

So I did a cleanup based on this suggestion (plus a stop and restart of the container) and tada it is finally working. :tada:

So, to draw some lessons from this that might be useful for others: what puzzles me is how exactly the container interacts with the outer NGINX. As I indicated earlier, I was assuming that they are two separate entities that are merely linked in that they are sending packets back and forth between them. In other words: changes in the NGINX-configuration will not affect the container at all, as long as those packets are still sent back and forth. But now it looks like the container “fixed itself” after I fixed the outer NGINX?!?

Or maybe this is just a combination of several independent issues? In other words: if I had done a container cleanup earlier, and then fixed the outer NGINX, the result would have been the same?

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