7. NGINX for the Application Developer | Mastering NGINX

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Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Aivaliotis

5 (1)

Mastering NGINX

5 (1)

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.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules

1. Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules

Installing NGINX using a package manager

Installing NGINX from source

Configuring SSL support

Enabling various modules

Finding and installing third-party modules

Adding support for Lua

Putting it all together

Summary

2. A Configuration Guide

2. A Configuration Guide

The basic configuration format

NGINX global configuration parameters

Using the include files

The HTTP server section

The virtual server section

Locations – where, when, and how

Full sample configuration

Summary

3. Using the mail Module

3. Using the mail Module

Basic proxy service

Authentication service

Combining with memcached

Interpreting log files

Operating system limits

Summary

4. NGINX as a Reverse Proxy

4. NGINX as a Reverse Proxy

Introducing reverse proxying

The proxy module

Legacy servers with cookies

The upstream module

Keepalive connections

Types of upstream servers

Single upstream server

Multiple upstream servers

Non-HTTP upstream servers

Load-balancing

Converting an if-fy configuration to a more modern interpretation

Using error documents to handle upstream problems

Determining the client's real IP address

Summary

5. Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics

5. Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics

Security through separation

Isolating application components for scalability

Reverse proxy performance tuning

Summary

6. The NGINX HTTP Server

6. The NGINX HTTP Server

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

Summary

7. NGINX for the Application Developer

7. NGINX for the Application Developer

Caching integration

Changing content on-the-fly

Using Server Side Includes

Decision-making in NGINX

Creating a secure link

Generating images

Tracking website visitors

Preventing inadvertent code execution

Summary

8. Integrating Lua with NGINX

8. Integrating Lua with NGINX

The ngx_lua module

Integrating with Lua

Logging with Lua

Summary

9. Troubleshooting Techniques

9. Troubleshooting Techniques

Analyzing log files

Configuring advanced logging

Common configuration errors

Operating system limits

Performance problems

Using the Stub Status module

Summary

A. Directive Reference

A. Directive Reference

B. The Rewrite Rule Guide

B. The Rewrite Rule Guide

Introducing the rewrite module

Creating new rewrite rules

Translating from Apache

Summary

C. The NGINX Community

C. The NGINX Community

NGINX Plus

Mailing list

IRC channel

Web resources

Writing a good bug report

Summary

D. Persisting Solaris Network Tunings

D. Persisting Solaris Network Tunings

Index

Index

Preventing inadvertent code execution

When trying to construct a configuration that does what you expect it to do, you may inadvertently enable something that you did not expect. Take the following configuration block, for example:

location ~* \.php {

  include fastcgi_params;

  fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

}

Here we seem to be passing all requests for the PHP files to the FastCGI server responsible for processing them. This would be OK if PHP only processed the file it was given, but due to differences in how PHP is compiled and configured this may not always be the case. This can become a problem if user uploads are made into the same directory structure that PHP files are in.

Users may be prevented from uploading files with a .php extension but are allowed to upload .jpg, .png, and .gif files. A malicious user could upload an image file with embedded PHP code, and cause the FastCGI server to execute this code by passing a URI with the uploaded filename in it.

To prevent this from happening...

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Programming languages

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