Nginx: How can I provide variable for paths in nginx configuration? - deployment

Question

I have a web application which I test locally and deploy on EC2 instance
I am using local nginx configuration which looks like as
location /static/ { alias /home/me/code/p/python/myapp/static/;
# if asset versioning is used
if ($query_string) {
expires max;
}
} location /templates/ { alias /home/me/code/p/python/app/templates/;
# if asset versioning is used
if ($query_string) {
expires max;
}
}
On EC2 instance, the only thing that would change is the path, e.g.
/home/me/code/p/python/myapp/static/ to /User/ubuntu/code/p/python/myapp/static/
To make this happen I change the configuration to look like
~/code/p/python/myapp/static/
but this didn't work, it shows the path
/etc/nginx/~/code/p/python/myapp/static/
which is not right
Question
- Is it possible to include environment variables in nginx conf?
What I want
- Nginx conf, which can read variables on specific machines to create paths, so that I don't have to change it per machine and code is reusable
Thank you

Answer 1

Two ways of doing this:
As suggested above, symlinking is a really good way of making paths match on machines, while keeping code in one place. A symbolic link basically is an alias; if /link is a symlink for /file, when you ask for /link, you'll get /file.
ln -s /file /link
Using include statements. In nginx, you can include variables.conf;. E.g.
nginx.conf:
include variables.conf
...
http {
listen $port;
...
}
variables.conf:
set $foo "Something";
set $bar "Else";
set $port 80;