I am trying to create soft links between config files containing server blocks in the sites-enabled and sites-available directories in /etc/nginx/.
The command I am using is:
sudo ln -s sites-available/foo.conf sites-enabled/
When I then execute:
ls -l
The result is:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 parallels parallels 27 Aug 6 20:44 immigrationinformation.conf -> immigrationinformation.conf
where the immigrationinformation.conf -> immigrationinformation.conf part has a charcoal with red typeface.
When I then try and access this soft-link, I am told that it is broken.
When I create the soft-link in the sites-available directory i.e.
sudo ln -s sites-available/foo.conf sites-available/foo_link.conf
it works as normal. However, if I then move this to the sites-enabled directory, the link is broken again.
I can create the soft link via the file manager GUI but not via the command line. I can also create hard-links with no problem.
I suspected it was a permissions issue so I have played around with setting all permissions to 777 of both directories and the directories themselves and also changing the owners to something other than root, but still with no luck.
Any help would me much appreciated, thank you.
sudo ln -s sites-available/ sites-enabled/foo.conf while standing inside the /etc/nginx directory
You need to start by understanding that the target of a symlink is a pathname. And it can be absolute or relative to the directory which contains the symlink
Assuming you have foo.conf in sites-available
Try
cd sites-enabled
sudo ln -s ../sites-available/foo.conf .
ls -l
Now you will have a symlink in sites-enabled called foo.conf which has a target ../sites-available/foo.conf
Just to be clear, the normal configuration for Apache is that the config files for potential sites live in sites-available and the symlinks for the enabled sites live in sites-enabled, pointing at targets in sites-available. That doesn't quite seem to be the case the way you describe your setup, but that is not your primary problem.
If you want a symlink to ALWAYS point at the same file, regardless of the where the symlink is located, then the target should be the full path.
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/foo.conf mysimlink-whatever.conf
Here is (line 1 of) the output of my ls -l /etc/apache2/sites-enabled:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Jun 24 21:06 000-default -> ../sites-available/default
See how the target of the symlink is relative to the directory that contains the symlink (it starts with ".." meaning go up one directory).
Hardlinks are totally different because the target of a hardlink is not a directory entry but a filing system Inode.
My site configuration file is example.conf in sites-available folder So you can create a symbolic link as
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
cd as the above path is absolute.
cd eg ln -s ../sites-available/example.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ as when the symlink is resolved it neither knows nor cares where ln was run from. (ln could even be run on a different machine then the symlink copied in). The relative path (for the target) has the advantage that it remains valid if the root of the installation is moved, or is viewed from a different perspective such as inside a container vs on the container host, or inside vs outside of a chroot
../sites-available/example.conf path is valid, sometimes you need to do ../../sites-available/example.conf and so on, the absolute path can be executed from anywhere, no require to resolve the path by yourself.
You can overwrite the existing file ../sites-enabled/myproject by forcing ln like this
sudo ln -sf ../sites-available/myproject ../sites-enabled/
then
sudo service nginx restart
To shorten manual typing of each conf file, you can try from sites-enabled folder:
ln -s ../sites-available/*.conf .
sudo systemctl restart nginx
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lncommand would be resolving the path for me, however I now see that I just need to specify the full path of the target, or the relative path from the location on the symlink.