GNet Solutions » Website Hosting

• Table of contents
• Install Nginx
  • Basic Website
  • Oleose Landing Page
• Resources

One of the websites I am working on at the moment isn't quite ready for production, but the domain name has already been purchased and I want something to show up when visited. To accomplish this I've setup a separate folder with Oleose, an open source landing page template, and set nginx to redirect to the landing page if not connected from localhost.

This is a guide on how to setup a landing page and redirect incoming Internet connections to the landing page with nginx on FreeBSD 10.

NOTE: This setup is done without performance-costing "if" statements; but rather sets the landing page as a custom access denied page, then using nginx's built-in access control list to deny all connections to the main website except for connections from 127.0.0.1.

Install Nginx¶

• Install nginx:
  

  pkg install nginx
  

• Start and enable nginx at boot:
  

  echo 'nginx_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
  service nginx start
  

• Create a configuration directory to make managing individual server blocks easier
  

  mkdir /usr/local/etc/nginx/conf.d
  

• Edit the main nginx config file:
  

  vi /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
  

  • And strip down the config file and add the include statement at the end to make it easier to handle various server blocks:
    

    worker_processes  1;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx-error.log;
    
    events {
        worker_connections  1024;
    }
    
    http {
        include       mime.types;
        default_type  application/octet-stream;
        sendfile        on;
        keepalive_timeout  65;
    
        # Load config files from the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory
        include /usr/local/etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    }
    

Basic Website¶

• Add a newsite.example.com server block:
  

  vi /usr/local/etc/nginx/conf.d/newsite.example.com.conf
  

  • Add the following:
    

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  newsite.example.com;
        root         /usr/local/www/newsite.example.com;
        access_log   /var/log/newsite.example.com-access.log;
        error_log    /var/log/newsite.example.com-error.log;
    
        location / {
          try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
        }
    }
    

• Restart nginx:
  

  service nginx restart
  

Oleose Landing Page¶

• Clone the oleose landing page from github:
  

  cd /usr/local/www
  git clone https://github.com/ScoopThemes/Oleose.git landing-page
  

• Edit the newsite.example.com server block:
  

  vi /usr/local/etc/nginx/conf.d/newsite.example.com.conf
  

  • Add the following:
    

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  newsite.example.com;
        root         /usr/local/www/newsite.example.com;
        access_log   /var/log/newsite.example.com-access.log;
        error_log    /var/log/newsite.example.com-error.log;
    
        location ~ ^/(?:CHANGELOG\.md|README.md|.git|.gitignore){
          deny all;
        }
    
        location / {
          error_page 403 = @internetland;
          allow 127.0.0.1;
          deny all;
          try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
        }
    
        location @internetland {
          return 301 $scheme://newsite.example.com/landing-page;
        }
    
        location /assets {
          alias /usr/local/www/landing-page/assets;
          index index.html
          allow all;
          try_files $uri $uri/;
        }
    
        location /landing-page {
          alias /usr/local/www/landing-page;
          index index.html
          allow all;
          try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
        }
    }
    

• Restart nginx:
  

  service nginx restart
  

• Now open a web browser and go to http://newsite.example.com , you will find that all requests from the internet are sent to http://newsite.example.com/landing-page

NOTE: Since the normal website is blocked to all but connections from localhost, I use an SSH tunnel to log into the web server:

ssh -L 8080:localhost:80 newsite.example.com

Then open a web browser and go to http://localhost:8080 to tunnel all HTTP traffic on port 8080 on the local machine.

Resources¶

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17993011/redirecting-all-requests-that-arent-from-my-ip-with-nginx