Nginx config file overwritten during Elastic Beanstalk deployment?

As of August, 2020 for Ruby 2.6 running on 64bit Amazon Linux 2/3.1.0:

Placing nginx files in the .platform/nginx/ works for me.

Here is my folder structure:

After spending almost entire day and trying out all the possible solutions, as of July 17, 2017, the above solution does not work. For me, I wanted to replace /etc/nginx/conf.d/elasticbeanstalk/00_application.conf I created the below shown folder structure in my .ebextension folder and the file was overwritten with my content. This solution also worked for nginx.conf which is located in /etc/nginx folder

It seems that Elastic Beanstalk has changed and the commonly recommended approach/hack of overwriting #etc#nginx#conf.d#00_elastic_beanstalk_proxy.conf doesn't work any more. Nor does creating any file in /tmp/deployment/config.

The solution I found was to overwrite /etc/nginx/conf.d/00_elastic_beanstalk_proxy.conf directly, using a container_commands directive, since these commands are executed after the Elastic Beanstalk install creates it's version of the nginx config.

From http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/customize-containers-ec2.html#linux-container-commands:

They [container_commands] run after the application and web server have been set up and the application version file has been extracted, but before the application version is deployed.

I did this in three steps within .ebextensions:

1. Create my version of the nginx config file.

2. Create a script to overwrite the standard config file with my own.

3. Run the script.

The first two steps happen earlier in the install process, while the last uses container_commands so as described previous happens late in the install.

Here's the files I used:

File .ebextensions/install_nginx_config_01.config:
(Note that the indenting is important)

#
#   STEP 1 - Create the nginx config file
#
files:

  "/tmp/my.nginx.conf" :
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      # This file was overwritten during deployment
      # by .ebextensions/install_nginx_config_03.config

      upstream nodejs {
          server 127.0.0.1:3000;
          keepalive 256;
      }

      server {
          listen 8080;

          location / {
              proxy_pass  http://nodejs;
              proxy_set_header   Connection "";
              proxy_http_version 1.1;
              proxy_set_header        Host            $host;
              proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP       $remote_addr;
              proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
          }

          gzip on;
          gzip_comp_level 4;
          gzip_types text/html text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
      }

File .ebextensions/install_nginx_config_02.config:

#
#   STEP 2 - Create a script that will overwrite the Nginx config
#
files:

  "/tmp/install-nginx-config.sh" :
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      #!/bin/sh
      cp /tmp/my.nginx.conf /tmp/deployment/config/#etc#nginx#conf.d#00_elastic_beanstalk_proxy.conf

File .ebextensions/install_nginx_config_03.config:

#
#   STEP 3 - Run the script to overwrite the nginx config template.
#
container_commands:

  01_runmyshellscript:
    command: "/tmp/install-nginx-config.sh"

As of this writing, the proper way to update/add values into the http config in the nginx.conf file without overwriting it is to add a .config file to the .ebextensions folder that looks like this:

files:
  "/etc/nginx/conf.d/custom_nginx.conf":
    content: |

      proxy_connect_timeout       600;
      proxy_send_timeout          600;
      proxy_read_timeout          600;
      send_timeout                600;

This creates a new file called custom_nginx.conf in the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory. Since the nginx.conf file contains

http {
  include       /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

when the server is started it will pull the 4 timeout vars from custom_nginx.conf into the http section of nginx.conf