Question

Nginx Restart Causes All Sites to Go Down on My Droplet

Posted on March 2, 2025
Deployment
Asked by Way2agribusiness

“I have a Django application running on my DigitalOcean droplet. After cloning my website, setting up a virtual environment, and running the Django server, the site works fine. However, when I restart the nginx server, all the sites hosted on this droplet go down. I need assistance in identifying why restarting nginx is causing downtime for all my hosted sites.”

I’m new to DigitalOcean and still in the early stages of learning, so I’d appreciate any guidance on troubleshooting this issue. Could this be related to my Nginx configuration or some other setting? Any help would be greatly appreciated!"

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• March 2, 2025

Hi there,

It sounds like Nginx might be failing to reload properly due to a configuration issue. Try running:

sudo nginx -t

This will check for syntax errors in your configuration before restarting. If there are errors, they’ll point you to what needs fixing.

Also, check the Nginx logs for more details:

sudo journalctl -u nginx --no-pager | tail -n 50

sudo tail -n 50 /var/log/nginx/error.log

If the issue persists, make sure your server blocks (/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/) are correctly configured and that you’re not missing any required files.

Let me know what the logs say!

- Bobby

Jeffrey Wolfe • March 3, 2025

Hi,

First, check if there are any syntax errors by running nginx -t before restarting. If it reports an error, fix it and try restarting again. Also, ensure that all your server blocks are correctly set up in /etc/nginx/sites-available/ and symlinked to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/.

If your Django app is running with Gunicorn, confirm that the service is active after restarting Nginx (systemctl status gunicorn). Sometimes, Nginx restarts before Gunicorn is fully up, causing downtime. You might need to restart Gunicorn manually or set it up as a systemd service to ensure it runs on reboot.

Hope this helps!