Dynamic include Nginx config snippets for vhosts

Question

I try to configure vhosts with and without additional per-vhost config with nginx. I think of something like this:

server {
    listen 81; 
    server_name ~^(www\.)?(?<sname>.+?)$;
    root /var/www/$sname;
    include /etc/nginx/sites/$sname;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/$sname/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/$sname/error.log;
}

Then i could just touch /etc/nginx/mysite.example.com to add a new site with static html, while i can edit the file for the vhost to add for example a reverse proxy directive or some rewrite rules.

The problem is, nginx seems to include the config when starting. And it would be more clean to have something like

for $config in /etc/nginx/sites:
    {
        server_name $config
        root /var/www/$config
        include $config
        [...]
    }

which should run at the start and not on the first request to the vhost.

Answer 1

I still do not know, if a script include is possible, but i am using a script to generate the static config now using jinja2 as template system.

An alternative to using an own script is to use the ansible template module. When using ansible it can also be much faster to create one large configuration instead of many snippets, which won't hurt as the templates used by ansible can still be small snippets that are concatenated when creating the autogenerated config.