Command-line parameters

nginx supports the following command-line parameters:

-? | -h — print help for command-line parameters.
-c file — use an alternative configuration file instead of a default file.
-e file — use an alternative error log file to store the log instead of a default file (1.19.5). The special value stderr selects the standard error file.

-g directives — set global configuration directives, for example,

nginx -g "pid /var/run/nginx.pid; worker_processes `sysctl -n hw.ncpu`;"

-p prefix — set nginx path prefix, i.e. a directory that will keep server files (default value is /usr/local/nginx).
-q — suppress non-error messages during configuration testing.
-s signal — send a signal to the master process. The argument signal can be one of:
- stop — shut down quickly
- quit — shut down gracefully
- reload — reload configuration, start the new worker process with a new configuration, gracefully shut down old worker processes.
- reopen — reopen log files
-t — test the configuration file: nginx checks the configuration for correct syntax, and then tries to open files referred in the configuration.
-T — same as -t, but additionally dump configuration files to standard output (1.9.2).
-v — print nginx version.
-V — print nginx version, compiler version, and configure parameters.