getting my rails app to accept large files

I'm developing a rails app where users will be able to upload files.

Currently I have my files on an online IDE called nitrous.io. When I upload a file above 17MB in size (or a combination of files like that). I get an error that says:

413 Request Entity Too Large
openresty/1.7.10.1

I did some reading and found out that this is a result of the client_max_body_size needing to be set in nginx.conf to an appropriate size. I went on and found that nginx is part of openresty and so the nginx.conf file was located in /etc/nginx/, added the line

client_max_body_size = 50M;

To the file and now it looks as follows:

user www-data;
worker_processes auto;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
events {
        worker_connections 768;
        # multi_accept on;
}
http {
        ##
        # Basic Settings
        ##
        sendfile on;
        tcp_nopush on;
        tcp_nodelay on;
        keepalive_timeout 65;
        types_hash_max_size 2048;
        # server_tokens off;
        # server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
        # server_name_in_redirect off;
# set client body size to 50MB #
client_max_body_size 50M;

        include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
        default_type application/octet-stream;
        ##
        # SSL Settings
        ##
        ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; # Dropping SSLv3, ref: POODLE
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
        ##
        # Logging Settings
        ##
        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
        ##
        # Gzip Settings
        ##
        gzip on;
        gzip_disable "msie6";
        # gzip_vary on;
        # gzip_proxied any;
        # gzip_comp_level 6;
        # gzip_buffers 16 8k;
        # gzip_http_version 1.1;
        # gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

        ##
        # Virtual Host Configs
        ##
        include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
        include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}


#mail {
#       # See sample authentication script at:
#       # http://wiki.nginx.org/ImapAuthenticateWithApachePhpScript
#
#       # auth_http localhost/auth.php;
#       # pop3_capabilities "TOP" "USER";
#       # imap_capabilities "IMAP4rev1" "UIDPLUS";
#
#       server {
#               listen     localhost:110;
#               protocol   pop3;
#               proxy      on;
#       }
#
#       server {
#               listen     localhost:143;
#               protocol   imap;
#               proxy      on;
#       }
#}

I then reloaded the nginx webserver by typing:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

and got an [OK] status on that.

However, I still can't upload large files through my rails app. I know in PHP apps you need to change the PHP.ini file to allow large uploads in addition to webserver configurations, is there an equivalent in Rails?

EDIT: Put in the entire nginx.conf contents

EDIT#2: This just occurred to me; Since I can upload files between 1MB-17MB in size, does that mean that my client_max_body_size attribute is overridden somehow? according to the documentation, nginx's default max body size is 1MB