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

Types of upstream servers


An upstream server is a server to which NGINX proxies a connection. This can be on a different physical or virtual machine, but doesn't have to be. The upstream server may be a daemon listening on a UNIX domain socket for connections on the local machine or could be one of many on a different machine listening over TCP. It may be an Apache server, with multiple modules to handle different kinds of requests, or a Rack middleware server, providing an HTTP interface to Ruby applications. NGINX can be configured to proxy to each of them.