Customizing Nginx Configuration in AWS Elastic Beanstalk

I found a way to restart nginx after deployment using an undocumented technique for running post-deployment scripts. I added this to my .ebextensions:

files:
  "/opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/post/03_restart_nginx.sh":
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      #!/usr/bin/env bash
      service nginx restart

I might be a little late with the response here, but I've discovered another, less intrusive way to configure nginx on Elastic Beanstalk. You can specify configuration files for nginx directly by creating an .ebextensions/nginx/conf.d directory. Any config files found inside are automatically copied to your /etc/nginx/conf.d/ directory during the EB deployment. This seems to be a more robust solution.

Documentation available here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/java-se-nginx.html

EDIT: As pointed out in comments, Elastic Beanstalk has inconsistent implementations between platforms. The documentation here is for Java SE, and it appears this documentation is not relevant for all platforms.

To reload the nginx config, you can use container_commands

From http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/elastic-beanstalk-config-files:

The container_commands key allows you to execute commands for your container. They are run after the application and web server have been set up and the application has been extracted, but before the application is deployed. container_commands are processed in lexicographical order by name.

container_commands:
  01_reload_nginx:
    command: "service nginx reload"