Adding a default «vhost» to nginx

Today I wanted to install this blog on my new nginx server. As this site is simply static html file, I thought why not using it as well to try to learn how to use it.

So I created my server :

        {% raw %}
        server {
          listen *:80;
          server_name bacardi55.org;
          root /var/www/b-55-log/web;

          access_log  /var/log/nginx/blog_access.log;
          error_log   /var/log/nginx/blog_error.log;
        }
        {% endraw %}

Then, I wanted to add two other domain to redirect to this one:

        {% raw %}
        server {
          listen *:80;
          server_name domaine2.tld domaine3.tld;
          access_log /var/log/nginx/other_domaine.access.log;

          rewrite        ^ http://bacardi55.org permanent;
        }
        {% endraw %}

But It didn’t work as I didn’t have a default server. The redirection wasn’t working as nginx considered my blog server the default. So the to 2 other vhost kept working and wasn’t redirected. I didn’t like that because I don’t want this blog to be indexed 3 times by search engines.

So to correct this, I had to create a default server that redirect everything that didn’t match any of my other server_name. This is what I put in my conf file:

        {% raw %}
        server {
          listen *:80 default;
          server_name _;
          access_log /var/log/nginx/default.access.log;

          server_name_in_redirect off;

          root  /var/www/;
        }
        {% endraw %}

Be careful though, I followed the documentation and put

listen 80 default;

And there you go :)

But it didn’t work. I actually had to put the IP:80 instead of just 80 as in the official doc.

I may have miss something in my nginx that make it doesn’t work but if than can help someone other than me :).

PS: Thanks to my friend Rustx to advising me not to use the IP address but only *:80.