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

Using the Stub Status module

NGINX provides an introspection module that outputs certain statistics about how it is running. This module is called stub_status and is enabled with the --with-http_stub_status_module configure flag.

To see the statistics produced by this module, the stub_status directive needs to be set to on. A separate location directive should be created for this module so that an ACL may be applied:

location /nginx_status {

    stub_status on;

    access_log off;

    allow 127.0.0.1;

    deny all;

}

Calling this URI from the localhost (for example, with curl http://localhost/nginx_status) will show output similar to the following lines:

Active connections: 2532
server accepts handled requests
1476737983 1476737983 3553635810
Reading: 93 Writing: 13 Waiting: 2426

Here we see that there are 2,532 open connections, of which NGINX is currently reading the request header of 93, and 13 connections are in a state in which NGINX is either reading the request body, processing...