$host_name variable in SSL certificate path in Nginx [closed] - ssl

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I'm trying to set up a default server in nginx with SSL, path to SSL certificate should contain sitename, something like that
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen 443 ssl default_server;
server_name _;
ssl_certificate ssl/$host_name/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key ssl/$host_name/privkey.pem;
and it doesn't work - in error log
cannot load certificate "/etc/nginx/ssl//fullchain.pem"
If I print this variable in headers with add_header XX "$http_host";
it shows the proper sitename. Is there any way to use sitename in certificate path? There are a lot of sites on my server with typical config so it's better for me to have just one config. Nginx version 1.18 and if I manually define some variable and put it in ssl_certificate parameter everything is working fine

Answer 1

You need to use $ssl_server_name instead of $host_name or $host - see an example in the docs. You see, the certificate is required before the client sends its HTTP request, so at that time $host_name and $host are not defined.
But as those docs say,
Note that using variables implies that a certificate will be loaded for each SSL handshake, and this may have a negative impact on performance.
So it's probably better to generate config files with fixed server names (and fixed certificate paths) for all your servers (using some kind of template).