Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

By : Dipankar Sarkar

Buy this Book

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

By: Dipankar Sarkar

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Nginx is an open source high-performance web server, which has gained quite some popularity recently. Due to its modular architecture and small footprint, it has been the default choice for a lot of smaller Web 2.0 companies for use as a load-balancing proxy server. It supports most of the existing back-end web protocols like FCGI, WSGI, and SCGI. This book is for you if you want to have in-depth knowledge of the Nginx server. Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook covers the whole range of techniques that would prove useful for you in setting up a very effective web application with the Nginx web server. It has recipes for lesser-known applications of Nginx like a mail proxy server, streaming of video files, image resizing on the fly, and much more. The first chapter of the book covers the basics that would be useful for anyone who is starting with Nginx. Each recipe is designed to be independent of the others. The book has recipes based on broad areas such as core, logging, rewrites, security, and others. We look at ways to optimize your Nginx setup, setting up your WordPress blog, blocking bots that post spam on your site, setting up monitoring using munin, and much more. Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook makes your entry into the Nginx world easy with step-by-step recipes for nearly all the tasks necessary to run your own web application.

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

The Core HTTP Module

Introduction

Installing new modules and compiling Nginx

Running Nginx in debug mode

Easy reloading of Nginx using the CLI

Splitting configuration files for better management

Setting up multiple virtual hosts

Setting up a default catch-all virtual host

Using wildcards in virtual hosts

Setting up the number of worker processes correctly

Increasing the size of uploaded files

Using dynamic SSI for simple sites

Adding content before and after a particular page

Enabling auto indexing of a directory

Serving any random web page from a directory

Serving cookies for identifying and logging users

Re-encoding the response to another encoding

Enabling Gzip compression on some content types

Setting up 404 and other error pages

All About Rewrites: The Rewrite Module

Introduction

Setting up a simple redirect

Using variables in your rewrite

Using cookies for your rewrites

Using browser agents for your rewrites

Using rate limits as a condition for rewrites

Blocking requests based on HTTP referrers

Serving maintenance page when deploying

Setting up a WordPress site with static file serving

Setting up a Drupal site with static file serving

Setting up a Magento site with static file serving

Converting your Apache's .htaccess into Nginx rewrites

Using maps to make configurations cleaner

Get It All Logged: The Logging Module

Introduction

Setting up error log path and levels

Logging it like Apache

Disabling logging of 404 in error logs

Using different logging profiles in the same setup

Enabling a log file cache

Utilizing separate error logs per virtual host

Setting up log rotation

Enabling remote logging with syslog-ng

Setting up your custom logs for easy parsing

Slow Them Down: Access and Rate Limiting Module

Introduction

Limiting requests for any given session

Blocking and allowing access using IP

Setting up simple rate limiting for a download directory

Rate limiting search engine bots

Setting up GeoIP using the MaxMind country database

Using the GeoIP module to set up access and rate control

Let's be Secure: Security Modules

Introduction

Setting up HTTP auth for access control

Generating a secure link for files

Setting up HTTPS for a simple site

Using non standard error codes for debugging SSL setup

Using wildcard certificates with multiple servers

Using Nginx SSL variables for rewrite rules

Setting Up Applications: FCGI and WSGI Modules

Introduction

Setting up a PHP FCGI site

Setting up a Python site using uWSGI

Modifying FCGI timeouts

Utilizing FCGI cache to speed it up

Using multiple FCGI backends

Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

Introduction

Using Nginx as a simple reverse proxy

Setting up a rails site using Nginx as a reverse proxy

Setting up correct reverse proxy timeouts

Setting up caching on the reverse proxy

Using multiple backends for the reverse proxy

Serving CGI files using thttpd and Nginx

Setting up load balancing with reverse proxy

Splitting requests based on various conditions using split-clients

Improving Performance and SEO Using Nginx

Introduction

Setting up TCP options correctly for optimizing performance

Reducing the keep-alives to free up Nginx workers

Using Memcached as the cache backend

Configuring the right event model and file limits

Setting max-age expiry headers for client-side caching

Blocking scrapers, bots, and spiders to save bandwidth

Redirection of www to non-www domain for SEO

Removing all white space from response

Setting up server status for monitoring

Setting up Munin for 24x7 Nginx monitoring

Enabling GZIP pre-compression

Preventing hotlinking using Nginx

Using embedded Perl to minify JavaScript files

Using embedded Perl to minify CSS files

Using embedded Perl to serve sitemaps (SEO)

Setting up Boost module on Drupal with Nginx

Setting up streaming for Flash files

Utilizing the 1x1 GIF serving module to do offline processing

Using Other Third-party Modules

Introduction

Setting up an IMAP/POP3 proxy server

Setting up authentication for mail services

Setting up SSL for mail authentication

Using Nginx as a WEBDAV reverse proxy

Dynamic image resizing using Nginx

Replacing and searching text in Nginx response

Assembling ZIP files on the fly

Using Nginx as a HTTP publish-subscribe server

Transforming XML responses using XSLT templates

Setting up Etags for static content

Easy logging of page load times

Streaming of MP4/H.264 files

Setting up SCGI sites

Setting up expiring links

Some More Third-party Modules

Introduction

Configuring a fair load balancing

Setting up health checks for backend servers

Tracking and reporting file upload progress

Generating circles for round edges using Nginx

Running Python using Phusion Passenger

Generating graphs directly from RRDtool in Nginx

Using Google performance tools

Serving content directly from GridFS

Configuring Basic HTTP auth using PAM

Configuring Basic HTTP auth using Kerberos

Index

Customer Reviews

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1 star

Installing new modules and compiling Nginx

Today, most softwares are designed to be modular and extensible. Nginx, with its great community, has an amazing set of modules out there that lets it do some pretty interesting things. Although most operating system distributions have Nginx binaries in their repositories, it is a necessary skill to be able to compile new, bleeding edge modules, and try them out. Now we will outline how one can go about compiling and installing Nginx with its numerous third-party modules.

How to do it...

The first step is to get the latest Nginx distribution, so that you are in sync with the security and performance patches (http://sysoev.ru/nginx/nginx-0.7.67.tar.gz). Do note that you will require sudo or root access to do some of the installation steps going ahead.
Un-tar the Nginx source code. This is simple, you will need to enter the following command:
```
tar -xvzf nginx-0.7.67.tar.gz
```
Go into the directory and configure it. This is essential, as here you can enable and disable the core modules that already come with Nginx. Following is a sample configure command:
```
./configure -–with-debug \
--with-http_ssl_module \
--with-http_realip_module \ 
--with-http_ssl_module \ 
--with-http_perl_module \ 
--with-http_stub_status_module
```
You can figure out more about what other modules and configuration flags use:
```
./configure -–help
```
If you get an error, then you will need to install the build dependencies, depending on your system. For example, if you are running a Debian based system, you can enter the following command:
```
apt-get build-dep nginx
```
This will install all the required build dependencies, like PCRE and TLS libraries.
After this, you can simply go ahead and build it:
```
sudo make install
```
This was the plain vanilla installation! If you want to install some new modules, we take the example of the HTTP subscribe-publish module:
Download your module (http://pushmodule.slact.net/downloads/nginx_http_push_module-0.692.tar.gz).
Un-tar it at a certain location:/path/to/module.
Reconfigure Nginx installation:
```
./configure ..... --add-module=/path/to/module
```
The important part is to point the –add-module flag to the right module path. The rest is handled by the Nginx configuration script.
You can continue to build and install Nginx as shown in step 5.
```
sudo make install
```

If you have followed steps 1 to 10, it will be really easy for you to install any Nginx module.

There's more...

If you want to check that the module is installed correctly, you can enter the following command:

nginx -V

A sample output is something as shown in the following screenshot:

This basically gives you the compilation flags that were used to install this particular binary of Nginx, indirectly listing the various modules that were compiled into it.

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

By : Dipankar Sarkar

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

By: Dipankar Sarkar

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

Installing new modules and compiling Nginx

How to do it...

There's more...