I maintain servers with nginx only (no apache, no other webserver-sw at all) and ISPcfg is not ready for that option, I found. How do I make sure ISPcfg doesn't update, change or add to any file under /etc/nginx/ ? I realize ISPCfg needs one vhost for itself, is there a way to safely have ISPCfg change/add to *only* that 1 vhost file? In my opinion ISPCfg doesn't yet write out a good nginx config layout, and the way it handles letsencrypt certs is not how I prefer to do it either.
Thank you for sharing your personal opinion. Please don't bear that I and several large nginx business hosters with thousands of servers that I know using ISPConfig + nginx don't share it. You can disable the web module in mods-enabled folder and if you don't want to use ISPConfig, then simply uninstall it. There is a uninstall.php in the install folder of the ispconfig tar.gz. Like any config file in ISPConfig, it's fully customizable if you don't like it to be the way that we prefer it to be, then feel free to change the ngnx master template to match your personal preferences. And the paths the files are placed, yes, that's the way it is done on Debian and Ubuntu servers. So when you knew CentOS only, then this layout might be new to you.
I may have worded it a little too harsh, for that I apologize. What I mean is that whenever I tried to use ISPconfig to create and maintain all vhosts for nginx, it wasn't doing this without failures; Some vhosts just didn't work, or had diifculty being TLS/SSL only. There are other posts where I already pointed out what went wrong, and I'll gladly help make it better. There may be logic to how you've created it, relating to the config for nginx, but that logic isn't always working for all setups, not even when you follow the 'Perfect Server' posts to the dot, which I've often experienced. It had a tendency to require apache at several stages, last time I tried nginx only with ISPcfg, perhaps that's improved now, and it had apache-converted configs that just weren't fully according to nginx spec, or worked in 1 version of nginx, but not the other. Either way, it may work well for people that don't require anything special in their nginx config, users that never look inside /etc/nginx/ for something outside of ISPcfg, but that's just not me. I mostly use and love ISPconfig for the ways it handles email, which it does very well, anti-spam profiles, DKIM creation, aliases, domain-aliasing etc. I'm going to setup a couple of new debian 9 servers coming days, I'll try and have ISPcfg do the nginx only stuff, see how it handles it now. If it's not working for me, I'll disable the web-module. Is there a way to then still have the vhost for ISPconfig's webGUI functional?
The ispconfig vhost is not coupled to the web module, so you can disable it and keep using the ISPConfig Ui for mail.
I am using ISPConfig + nginx and everything is great. I even customized my server to use the latest version of its softwares as much as possible, though it may not be encouraged if one aims on stability. From my point of view, you need a custom conf rather than using the default one, though I only did a minor changes on the default conf so far and everything still work great. Feel free to ask or clarify what you actually need.
