Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Aivaliotis

Overview of this book

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server and mail proxy designed to use very few system resources. But despite its power it is often a challenge to properly configure NGINX to meet your expectations. Mastering Nginx is the solution – an insider’s guide that will clarify the murky waters of NGINX’s configuration. Tune NGINX for various situations, improve your NGINX experience with some of the more obscure configuration directives, and discover how to design and personalize a configuration to match your needs. To begin with, quickly brush up on installing and setting up the NGINX server on the OS and its integration with third-party modules. From here, move on to explain NGINX's mail proxy module and its authentication, and reverse proxy to solve scaling issues. Then see how to integrate NGINX with your applications to perform tasks. The latter part of the book focuses on working through techniques to solve common web issues and the know-hows using NGINX modules. Finally, we will also explore different configurations that will help you troubleshoot NGINX server and assist with performance tuning.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
10
A. Directive Reference
13
D. Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
14
Index

Chapter 1. Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules

NGINX was first conceived to be an HTTP server. It was created to solve the C10K problem, described by Daniel Kegel on http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html, in designing a web server to handle 10,000 simultaneous connections. NGINX can do this through its event-based connection-handling mechanism and will use the OS-appropriate event mechanism in order to achieve this goal.

Before we begin exploring how to configure NGINX, we will first install it. This chapter details how to install NGINX and how to get the correct modules installed and configured. NGINX is modular by design and there is a rich community of third-party module developers who have added functionality to the core NGINX server by creating modules that can be compiled into the server and installed along with it.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Installing NGINX using a package manager
  • Installing NGINX from source
  • Configuring for a web or mail service
  • Configuring SSL support
  • Enabling various modules
  • Finding and installing third-party modules
  • Adding support for Lua
  • Putting it all together