A lot of server administrators rely on control panel software to simplify many aspects of their work: managing hosted domains, email accounts, network settings, and much more. Advanced software solutions, such as Parallels Plesk or cPanel, are able to generate configuration files for many server applications (web, email, database, and so on) on-the-fly. Unfortunately, most of them only support Apache as a unique web server application; Nginx is often left behind.

If you followed the steps of the reverse proxy configuration process, you noticed that at some point, the Apache configuration files had to be manually edited. We replaced the listening port and edited or inserted some configuration directives. Obviously, when the control panel software generates configuration files, it is unaware of the manual changes we made. Therefore, it erases our modifications. When you restart Apache, you are greeted with error messages and conflicts.

At this point, there is no solution other than to apply the changes again after each configuration rebuild. With the growing popularity of Nginx, developers will hopefully implement full Nginx support in their software, or at least allow those configuration settings, which are required to use Nginx as a reverse proxy, to be edited.