LAB 11 – Break-fix challenge 🔧¶
Story: It's Monday morning. Over the weekend "someone" deployed eight changes to the edge. Production is on fire, the ticket queue is full. You have 45 minutes.
| Duration | ~40 min (works great in pairs or as a team competition) |
| You edit | env/nginx/conf.d/99-bf-*.conf |
| Score | ./bin/ngx check |
Start¶
./bin/ngx breakfix # copies 8 broken configs to env/nginx/conf.d/99-bf-*.conf
./bin/ngx check # your score - run it as often as you like
Each file starts with the ticket text and the expected behaviour. The servers listen on plain HTTP: bf1.localtest.me … bf8.localtest.me.
The tickets¶
| # | Ticket | Hint (only if you are stuck) |
|---|---|---|
| BF1 | Product images under /images/ return 404 since the last deploy. |
Compare the location and the alias path character by character. Read env/logs/error.log. |
| BF2 | The application generates links with the host name bf2_app. |
What Host header does NGINX send by default? |
| BF3 | Security scan: CSS/JS files are missing X-Content-Type-Options and X-Frame-Options. |
add_header inheritance. |
| BF4 | Uploading a 2 MB product photo fails. | What status code do you get? |
| BF5 | nginx does not reload any more! Old URLs /legacy/<path> must reach the API as /<path>. |
./bin/ngx test tells you exactly what is wrong. rewrite ... break. |
| BF6 | Customers get 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable when they click quickly. | Look at rate, burst and the status code. |
| BF7 | Live chat on /echo fails with HTTP 400. |
WebSocket needs two headers and HTTP/1.1. |
| BF8 | Browser: ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS on /old-path. |
Which location matches /new-path? curl -sI shows every hop. |
Tip: start with BF5 – as long as
nginx -tfails, none of your other fixes can be reloaded.
Useful commands¶
./bin/ngx test && ./bin/ngx reload
curl -sv http://bf1.localtest.me/images/logo.svg -o /dev/null
tail -f env/logs/error.log
./bin/ngx dump | grep -n -A15 'bf6.localtest.me'
Finish¶
✅ Goal: Score: 8 / 8.
Then discuss with your neighbour: which of these bugs would nginx -t have caught? Which only a test (curl, smoke tests in CI) would catch? How would you prevent each in a real pipeline?
Clean up: rm env/nginx/conf.d/99-bf-*.conf && ./bin/ngx reload
Files for this lab: Think-Cube/nginx-labs/labs/LAB11-break-fix