How to disable timeout for nginx?

Question

On a local development machine, I have a nginx reverse proxy like so:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name myvirtualhost1.local;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
}

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name myvirtualhost2.local;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9090;
}

Yet if I debug my application, the response may be delayed for an infinite amount of time, yet after 30 seconds I get:

504 Gateway Time-out

as a response.

How can I disable the timeout and have my reverse proxy wait forever for a response? And I like the setting to be global, so that I do not have to set it for each proxy.

Answer 1

It may not be possible to disable it at all, yet a feasible workaround is to increase the execution time. On a nginx tutorial site, it was written:

If you want to increase time-limit for all-sites on your server, you can edit main nginx.conf file:

vim /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Add following in http{..} section

http {
     fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
     proxy_read_timeout 300;
}

and reload nginx' config:

sudo service nginx reload

I have used a rather large value that is unlikely to happen, i.e. 999999 or using time units, to one day via 1d.

Beware that setting the value to 0 will cause a gateway timeout error immediately.

Answer 2

It is possible to increase the timeout for nginx, to add to @k0pernikus 's answer, the following can be added to your location block:

        location /xyz {
         proxy_read_timeout 1800;
         proxy_connect_timeout 1800;
         proxy_send_timeout 1800;
         send_timeout 1800;
        }

Here 1800 is in seconds.

After changing the config, verify the syntax with:

nginx -t -c /some/path/nginx.conf

Then reload nginx with:

nginx -s reload

Answer 3

If you are using AWS, and Load Balancer, you should edit Idle timeout. I think default is 60 seconds

Answer 4

I've been fighting with nginx 502 timeout error and could not solve the issue. However, it happened to be gunicorn causing the timeout error. So you might also need to check your fastcgi settings.

For gunicorn it's:

gunicorn wsgi:application --timeout 300