Nginx has ssl module, but thinks it doesn't

Question

I'm adding an SSL domain to a host. When I try to restart Nginx, it protests:

Restarting nginx: [emerg]: the "ssl" parameter requires ngx_http_ssl_module in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/my_site_conf:16

This is frustrating because I actually rebuilt Nginx and Passenger specifically in order to make ngx_http_ssl_module available; it wasn't in the running instance, so I took the opportunity to build with Nginx 0.8.53 and Passenger 3.0.1.

The relevant configuration block is

server {
        listen  0.0.0.0:443 default ssl;
        server_name  our-site.com;

        ssl_certificate  /etc/nginx/ssl/our-site.crt;
        ssl_certificate_key  /etc/nginx/ssl/our-site.key;

        ssl_session_timeout  5m;

        ssl_protocols  SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1;
        ssl_ciphers  ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP;
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers   on;

...etc. etc. (obviously I've obscured the host name, don't need this question coming up in searches for that domain.)

• How can I be sure the running Nginx instance has the SSL module active?
• Am I missing something obvious here?

Answer 1

You are missing the SSL on directive.

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule

Answer 2

Looks like the real problem was that my init script (in /etc/init.d/nginx) was still calling the old version of Nginx, the one without the SSL module, because of a $PATH issue. Fixing some symlinks and deleting the old version fixed the problem.