Nginx 1.12.0 unable to start after initial installation on RHEL 7 if access_log is uncommented

[shekharshan@…]

On RHEL 7 I installed Nginx by adding a yum repo

[nginx]
name=nginx repo
baseurl=​http://nginx.org/packages/rhel/7/$basearch/
gpgcheck=0
enablied=1

After installation I updated /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf and uncommented the line

access_log /var/log/nginx/log/host.access.log main;

Then I tried to start the nginx.service systemd unit

-- Unit nginx.service has begun starting up.
Jun 05 16:43:23 nginx[2960]: nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
Jun 05 16:43:23 nginx[2960]: nginx: [emerg] open() "/var/log/nginx/log/host.access.log" failed (2: No such file or directory)
Jun 05 16:43:23 nginx[2960]: nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed
Jun 05 16:43:23 systemd[1]: nginx.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
Jun 05 16:43:23 systemd[1]: Failed to start nginx - high performance web server.

When I change the access_log in default.conf to /var/log/nginx/access.log then I was able to successfully start the service.

Perhaps making that access_log value change in default.conf will fix this issue.

[thresh]

Thanks! I've commited the changes to the packaging sources - the package for the next 1.12 stable release will have the fix.