Debugging nginx config with add_header

Problem

Sometimes you are configuring the nginx server and it doesn’t work as expected. You are not sure what’s wrong with the config file. You can use the add_header directive to debug the issue.

Solution

For this tutorial i am using this config file which you can find in my github repo

http {
	server {
		listen 8080;
		location / {
			root /usr/share/nginx/html;
		}

		location /site1/ {
            # here is the add_header directive
            add_header Debug_value "Daniel was here";
			root /;
		}

		location /site2/ {
			root /;
		}
 	}
}

events {}

You can check this value on your browser by inspecting the network tab. You can see the Debug_value in the response header.