Nginx not picking up site in sites-enabled?

After over 10 hours of research I have not figured out why this doesn't work! I am trying to move my localhost to my sites-enabled folder which is in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default.

It IS a symlink from the sites-available folder. When using the following configuration I get an "unable to connect" using localhost:8080 as my address

nginx.conf (/usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf):

user  www-data;
worker_processes  2;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; 
}

sites-available (/etc/nginx/sites-available/default):

server {
  listen   8080;
  root /home/myusername/myown/customdirectory;
  index index.php index.html index.htm;
  server_name localhost;

	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
	}

	location /doc/ {
		alias /usr/share/doc/;
		autoindex on;
		allow 127.0.0.1;
		allow ::1;
		deny all;
	}


	error_page 404 /404.html;

	error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
	location = /50x.html {
		root /usr/share/nginx/www;
	}

	location ~ \.php$ {
		fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
		fastcgi_index index.php;
		include fastcgi_params;
	}

	location ~ /\.ht {
		deny all;
	}
}

I can get this working if I put the relevant info from sites available to the nginx.conf, I just can't figure out why it doesn't work this way?

Thanks!

I had the same problem. It was because I had accidentally used a relative path with the symbolic link.

Are you sure you used full paths, e.g.:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com.conf

Changing from:

include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; 

to

include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.*; 

fixed my issue

Include sites-available/default in sites-enabled/default. It requires only one line.

In sites-enabled/default (new config version?):

It seems that the include path is relative to the file that included it

include sites-available/default;

See the include documentation.

---

I believe that certain versions of nginx allows including/linking to other files purely by having a single line with the relative path to the included file. (At least that's what it looked like in some "inherited" config files I've been using, until a new nginx version broke them.)

In sites-enabled/default (old config version?):

It seems that the include path is relative to the current file

../sites-available/default