How to see all virtual hosts in nginx

Nginx usually stores one virtual host per configuration file and each one is configured using the server_name entry. One could create a custom shell script to parse these files, but there is a more reliable method.

Using the configuration test option

Normally you could test the nginx configuration using the -t option. The capitalized -T does the same, but also shows the configuration. This can be great for showing any configured virtual host and the related hostname(s).

nginx -T -q | grep server_name

This will show the related entries in the configuration, but not as clean as we always want.

nginx -T -q | grep server_name | awk '{if($1=="server_name"){print}}' | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -v '^$' | tr -d ';' | grep -v server_name | sort -u

So what this does do?

• nginx: show the configuration
• grep: only filter out the configured server_name lines
• awk: only show lines where there is actual configuration of the server_name
• tr: replace spaces with line breaks
• grep: strip out empty lines
• tr: delete the semi-colon
• grep: strip out the server_name keyword
• sort: sort and make output unique

The output then only shows the configured domains:

archive.linux-audit.com
linux-audit.com
www.linux-audit.com

Perfect!