TLS connection refused with nothing on logs - linux

Question

I've been attempting to install an SSL certificate for the past several hours to no success. There are no errors on the nginx log, but everytime I try to access my website through https I just get a connection refused.
I've tried everything I can find on Google and SO results:
I've disabled the Ubuntu firewall
I've run netstat and there's an active listen on port 443
I've verified the sha256 checksum of the certificate, private key and certificate requests
service nginx restart + service nginx status shows everything ok
I feel like I'm arriving at the limit of my experience with nginx (which isn't much) and Linux, so I turn to SO for help.
Here's a redacted copy of my nginx.conf, which proxies the requests to a Node.JS server:
server {
listen my.ip.address:80;
listen my.ip.address:443 ssl;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/my-server.com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/my-server.com.key;
server_name my-server.com;
client_max_body_size 700m;
root "/var/www/my-website/";
access_log "/var/www/my-website/logs/access_log";
error_log "/var/www/my-website/logs/error_log";
location / {
proxy_connect_timeout 300s;
proxy_send_timeout 600;
proxy_read_timeout 600;
proxy_buffer_size 64k;
proxy_buffers 16 32k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_hide_header Vary;
proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding '';
proxy_pass http://my.ip.address:8080;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Accel-Internal /internal-nginx-static-location;
proxy_no_cache $arg_aid;
access_log off;
}
location /internal-nginx-static-location/ {
alias /var/www/my-website/;
add_header Cache-Control no-cache;
add_header X-Powered-By nginx;
internal;
}
}
I'm running nginx 1.10.3 on Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Answer 1

Add below line before "ssl_certificate xxx" line and try
ssl on;
Updated:
Can you try with this simple config.
upstream myapp {
server http://my.ip.address:8080;
}
server {
listen 443;
server_name mywebsite;
access_log /var/log/nginx/app_access.log main;
error_log /var/log/nginx/app_error.log;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/nginx.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/certs/nginx.key;
location / {
proxy_pass http://myapp;
}
}

Answer 2

The problem was caused by a nano .conf.save backup on the nginx /sites-enabled folder which had a misconfigured https server declaration - I was not aware that nginx loaded files other than .conf.

Answer 3

'Connection refused' means that nothing was listening at the target IP and port you tried to connect to.
It has nothing to do with HTTPS, TLS, SSL, or certificates whatsoever.