Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Dimitri Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Dimitri 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 (20 chapters)
Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Directive Reference
Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
Index

Chapter 4. NGINX as a Reverse Proxy

A reverse proxy is a web server that terminates connections with clients and makes new ones to upstream servers on their behalf. An upstream server is defined as a server that NGINX makes a connection with in order to fulfill the client's request. These upstream servers can take various forms, and NGINX can be configured differently to handle each of them.

NGINX configuration, which you have been learning about in detail, can be difficult to understand at times. There are different directives that may be used to fulfill similar configuration needs. Some of these options should not really be used, as they can lead to unexpected results.

At times, an upstream server may not be able to fulfill a request. NGINX has the capability to deliver an error message to the client, either directly from this upstream server, from its local disk, or as a redirect to a page on a completely different server.

Due to the nature of a reverse proxy, the upstream server doesn't...