nginx only serving welcome index page - html

Question

I'm running nginx off of EC2 server
to try to troubleshoot this I created a separate directory usr/loca/nginx/html/test and put a copy of the index.html file there. I deleted the original index.html file from usr/loca/nginx/html
here is my relevant code...
nginx.conf.default
worker_processes 1;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include mime.types;
include usr/local/nginx/conf/*.conf
default_type application/octet-stream;
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
location / {
root html/test;
index index.html index.htm;
}
}
i try to access the site by http://'public ip address'/index.html and all i get is the default nginx startup page; even though i deleted this file, and even though i changed the text in the original index.html file to something else
i tried reloading nginx and clearing cache etc.....

Answer 1

I think your root directive is not pointing to the correct location. Your root directive is relative i.e. relative to the current folder. This is a very bad thing to do. Always do root relative directive. I will do something like
/home/user/www/localhost
You can choose a directory of you liking but make it root relative. Note the leading slash. If welcome page is working then NGINX is working correctly and the fault usually lies in wrong root directive. You can also make the following improvements.
First of all get the root out of sever block. Putting root in the server block is bad.
http://nginx.org/en/docs/beginners_guide.html#proxy
Why is your Nginx configuration file called nginx.conf.default? It should just be called nginx.conf (this may also be leading to the problem). See if you have a file called nginx.conf and make changes to that.
Why are you declaring the server inside nginx.conf? It is better to declare it inside a folder like
sites-available/localhost
sites-available/somesite
...
Then create a symlink to sites-enabled. This is not required but it is a good practice.