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

Non-HTTP upstream servers


So far, we've focused on communicating with upstream servers over HTTP. For this, we use the proxy_pass directive. As hinted earlier in this chapter, in the Keepalive connections section, NGINX can proxy requests to a number of different kinds of upstream server. Each has its corresponding *_pass directive.

Memcached upstream servers

The memcached NGINX module (enabled by default) is responsible for communicating with a memcached daemon. As such, there is no direct communication between the client and the memcached daemon; that is, NGINX does not act as a reverse proxy in this sense. The memcached module enables NGINX to speak the memcached protocol so that a key lookup can be done before a request is passed to an application server:

upstream memcaches {

  server 10.0.100.10:11211;

  server 10.0.100.20:11211;

}

server {

  location / {

    set $memcached_key "$uri?$args";

    memcached_pass memcaches;

    error_page 404 = @appserver;

  }
  location @appserver...