Nginx only shows welcome page

Missing includes in nginx.conf

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

http://wiki.nginx.org/CoreModule#include

the debian/ubuntu nginx package comes with a default sites-available that takes over the default host dispatch. Simply remove the default link and it should load your site instead.

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another gotcha, the debian/ubuntu nginx package also comes with a default index value for the default server in the default site that reads:

index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

I've had the file index.nginx-debian.html show up in my www root directory, which took precedence over the cgi locations.

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nginx has a verbose test mode that can be used to dump the entire configuration as parsed by nginx, which you can sanity check against your expectations.

nginx -T