Nginx and Amazon EC2 with multiple static subdomains - html

Question

Currently have a pure HTML website with some embedded JS code to control flow between HTML files along with graph configuration details. The directories are as follows: html, css, fonts, img, js, sound. On my local machine, I can easily open the HTML files and navigate the site. I am using an Ubuntu Amazon EC2 instance with nginx as the reverse proxy. When running a express.js controlled website on the instance I usually just edit the nginx config file and start the app/server.js file. However, I am unsure as to how to do this with a set of static HTML files that have CSS and other assets associated with them. Below is my attempt at writing the nginx file but I'm not sure if what I'm proposing is possible.
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
root /var/www/website-dashboard/;
index index.html;
# Make site accessible from http://localhost/
server_name localhost;
location / {
default_type "text/html";
try_files $uri.html $uri $uri/ /index.html;
access_log off;
}
}

Answer 1

You shouldn't have a problem opening HTML files with NGINX - The question is, considdering you're running NGINX as a reverse proxy, what are you running as your web server?
If you're running Apache then you need to make sure it's running on port 8080 and the below NGINX configuration should meet your requirements.
upstream apachebackend {
server 127.0.0.1:8080; #apachebackend
}
server {
listen 80 default;
server_name www.domain.com domain.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/domain.com.access.log main;
error_log /var/log/nginx/domain.com.error.log;
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
index index.html index.htm index.php;
## send request back to apachebackend ##
location / {
proxy_pass http://apachebackend;
proxy_next_upstream error timeout invalid_header http_500 http_502 http_503 http_504;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_buffering on;
proxy_buffers 12 12k;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
}
}
If you're running NGINX as your web server then you need to set it up accordingly. The default set-up should suffice, just drop your files in the default vhost directory, but I recommend setting it up correctly using separate directories and log files.