Nginx 502 Bad Gateway error

My server went down today and after restarting, it came up with a “Nginx 502 Bad Gateway” message. At first I thought its something related to the Nginx service, so restarted the nginx service but immediately realized it wasn’t the case.

Nginx receives a request on port 80 and it then proxies the request to ‘localhost’ on port 8080 (in my case) where another service is configured on it. If no service is listening on port 8080, it results in a ‘Nginx 502 Bad gateway’ message. I immediately realized it was the Java service binded on port 8080 of my server and started it.

# java -jar /home/user/test.jar

The website was online immediately.

The Nginx proxy port is defined in the Nginx configuration file and different services could be binded to the proxy port depending on your setup. It could be

1) PHP-fpm
2) php_cgi
3) FastCGI

OR could be something else. You have to start the service listening on the proxy port to get your website/application online.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2011 and is filed under Linux Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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