Linux Symbolic Linking not working as expected
I have achieved my "goal" several times before but am running into an issue I have not yet experienced before. I have a webserver setup with Nginx on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I have my system setup the way I normally would and am attempting to create a symbolic link for the site "virtual host" from the sites-available to the sites-enabled directory. Typically, this is achieve with the following from the primary nginx directory (as root):
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/site.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/site.com
While I can move into the enabled directory and view the symbolic link has "worked", when I try and edit the file directly in the sites-enabled directory I see the file is blank and treated as a new file. As a result, my server does not work as expected and pages do not load. When I simply hard copy or hard link the file into the directory:
ln /etc/nginx/sites-available/site.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/site.com
It works without any issue. I however am stuck with two copies of the same file and no symbolic link.
What the heck gives?
Note: here is the structure of my current Nginx directory:
[email protected]:/etc/nginx# ls -l total 44 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 4 17:28 conf.d -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 964 Feb 12 08:41 fastcgi_params -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2837 Feb 12 08:41 koi-utf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2223 Feb 12 08:41 koi-win -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3463 Feb 12 08:41 mime.types -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1022 Mar 4 21:15 nginx.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 596 Feb 12 08:41 scgi_params drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 4 21:15 sites-available drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 4 21:19 sites-enabled -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 623 Feb 12 08:41 uwsgi_params -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3610 Feb 12 08:41 win-utf
Thank you for your help ahead of time!
Edit 1:
Showing the contents of the sites-enabled folder with ls -l:
[email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-enabled# ls -l total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Mar 5 10:23 www -> www
Final Answer
So after help from the @Insyte and @Michael Hampton, I figured out how to reproduce my error occassionally. The scenario played out as follows:
[email protected]:/etc/nginx# cd sites-available [email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-available# ls www [email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-available# ln -s www /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/www [email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-available# cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled [email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-enabled# ls -l total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Mar 5 10:48 www -> www
I am not aware of "why" but turns out that if I use full absolute paths each time then the issue does not exist.
So what you have there is a symbolic link that links back to itself. I don't see how that's possible with the command you listed at the top of your question, so I suspect this particular symbolic link was created differently.
I can replicate your scenario like this:
sazerac:~ insyte$ cd testlinks/
sazerac:~/testlinks insyte$ ls
sazerac:~/testlinks insyte$ ln -s www www
sazerac:~/testlinks insyte$ ls -l
total 8
lrwxr-xr-x 1 insyte staff 3 Mar 5 10:33 www -> www
Let's try an experiment. Execute the following commands exactly as listed:
echo "hello insyte" > /etc/nginx/sites-available/insyte
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/insyte /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ls -l /etc/nginx/sites-enabled|grep insyte
cat /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/insyte
You've somehow managed to create a symbolic link that links to itself. I didn't even know you could do that, but I'm quite sure it won't have the result you want.
To fix it, remove the symlink and recreate it correctly.
rm -f /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/www
Or just use the -f option to ln and it may remove the invalid symlink for you.
ln -fs /etc/nginx/sites-available/www /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/www