@mbbx6spp, thanks for your PR! By analyzing the history of the files in this pull request, we identified @globin, @domenkozar and @fadenb to be potential reviewers.

We've using appendHttpConfig for setting options like error_log, log_format, or add_header and it does seem to work fine for us.

Are there options that have to be defined before the server blocks?

@fpletz when I use appendHttpConfig with a custom log_format definition and I use the name of that custom log format inside the extraConfig attribute in an access_log line for either a virtual host (server block context) or a location context I receive an emerg error on nginx startup that looks like this:

proxy# [   16.076903] nginx[936]: nginx: [emerg] unknown log format "detailed" in /nix/store/HASH-nginx.conf:110

(when I use the virtualHosts declarative form and not managing my own server blocks inside the appendHttpConfig underneath my custom log_format). I would rather not resort to lumping all my virtual host server blocks inside the appendHttpConfig again. When I use the commonHttpConfig from this SHA, my nginx VM tests succeed since I don't receive an emerg error on nginx startup.

Of course, if I add a global access_log that refers to the custom log_format I would just put that underneath the log_format declaration and that might work, but when I do not want to universally apply the same access_log to all server contexts this does not apply.

Just to bump this because I don't think the use case is understood. appendHttpConfig does not satisfy my particular needs. Here is a small nginx config to demonstrate:

error_log  stderr;

events {

}

http {
  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name "my.bla.com";
    access_log   logs/my.bla.access.log  myformat;
  }
  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name "my.other.com";
    access_log   logs/my.other.access.log  combined;
  }

  # where appendHttpConfig would be placed.
  log_format myformat '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local]  $status '
    '"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
}

Checking nginx config file shows this emerg error as mentioned in the original description and my comment above.

$ nginx -t -c $PWD/crap2.conf
2017/03/06 18:14:19 [emerg] 20069#0: unknown log format "myformat" in <bla>/crap2.conf:9
nginx: configuration file <bla>/crap2.conf test failed

Hopefully that illustrates the problem with appendHttpConfig.

Also, this should be backported to 17.03 at least.

How about prependHttpConfig?

Is this going to make it into 17.03? @globin if you want to change it to prependHttpConfig you should make sure it goes all the way on the top. I didn't want to mess with the ordering too much. If it changes, please provide an update here and update the docs.

Yes, you're right. @globin and I discussed this a few minutes ago and we'll go with your suggestion. Thanks!

This will be backported to 17.03.