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 6. The NGINX HTTP Server

An HTTP server is primarily a piece of software that will deliver web pages to clients when requested. These web pages can be anything from a simple HTML file on disk to a multicomponent framework delivering user-specific content, dynamically updated through AJAX or WebSocket. NGINX is modular, and is designed to handle any kind of HTTP serving necessary.

In this chapter, we will investigate the various modules that work together to make NGINX such a scalable HTTP server. The following topics are included in this chapter:

  • NGINX's architecture
  • The HTTP core module
  • Using limits to prevent abuse
  • Restricting access
  • Streaming media files
  • Predefined variables
  • SPDY and HTTP/2
  • Using NGINX with PHP-FPM
  • Wiring NGINX and uWSGI together