nginx will not start

There was maintenance on the server overnight. In the morning the orders-api page does not open, whoever did the work is unreachable, and they left no notes. The machine is yours now, and so is the diagnosis.

The symptom

The first thing the on-call engineer sees: something answers at the address, but it is not the right site. The service will not start, and the init script does not explain why.

$ curl -s http://localhost/
status-page: maintenance

$ sudo service nginx start
 * Starting nginx nginx
   ...fail!

Look at that second output. The word fail is everything the init script knows: it launched the binary, got a non-zero exit code, and printed the verdict. The reason stayed with the service.

What you have to end up with<