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

Introducing reverse proxying


NGINX can serve as a reverse proxy by terminating requests from clients and opening new ones to its upstream servers. On the way, the request can be split up according to its URI, client parameters, or some other logic, in order to best respond to the request from the client. Any part of the request's original URL can be transformed on its way through the reverse proxy.

The most important directive when proxying to an upstream server is the proxy_pass directive. This directive takes one parameter—the URL to which the request should be transferred. Using proxy_pass with a URI part will replace the request_uri variable with this part. For example, /uri in the following example will be transformed to /newuri when the request is passed on to the upstream:

location /uri {

  proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/newuri;
}

There are two exceptions to this rule, however. First, if the location is defined with a regular expression, no transformation of the URI occurs. In this...