Context

The best practice with nginx configurations is to have separate folders for sites-available and sites-enabled then just include the latter folder in your nginx.conf file. sites-available is where your confs are. sites-enabled just has symlinks to the ones in the other folder. It’s important you do the symlink right. If it’s broken, nginx will read an empty file and not throw any error at you. Yup, so basic. I’m ashame. Ahuhu.

Lesson

You symlink by doing the following command:

ln -s source_file target_file

Make sure it’s the absolute path. You should be able to nano or vi the symlink as you would the source file.