NGINX is a high-performance web server designed to use very few system resources. There are many how-to guides and example configurations floating around the Web. This guide will serve to clarify the murky waters of NGINX configuration. In doing so, you will learn how to tune NGINX for various situations, what some of the more obscure configuration options do, and how to design a decent configuration to match your needs.
You will no longer feel the need to copy-paste a configuration snippet because you will understand how to construct a configuration file to do exactly what you want it to do. This is a process and there will be bumps along the way, but with the tips explained in this book, you will feel comfortable writing an NGINX configuration file by hand. In case something doesn't work as expected, you will be able to debug the problem yourself, or at least be capable of asking for help without feeling like you haven't given it a try yourself.
This book is written in a modular fashion. It is laid out to help you get to the information you need as quickly as possible. Each chapter is pretty much a standalone piece. Feel free to jump in anywhere you feel you need to get more in-depth about a particular topic. If you feel you have missed something major, go back and read the earlier chapters. They are constructed in a way to help you grow your configuration piece by piece.
Chapter 1, Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules, teaches you how to install NGINX on your operating system of choice and how to include third-party modules in your installation.
Chapter 2, A Configuration Guide, explains the NGINX configuration file format. You will learn what each of the different contexts is for, how to configure global parameters, and what a location is used for.
Chapter 3, Using the mail Module, explores NGINX's mail proxy module, detailing all aspects of its configuration. An example authentication service is included in the code for this chapter.
Chapter 4, NGINX as a Reverse Proxy, introduces the concept of a reverse proxy and describes how NGINX fills that role.
Chapter 5, Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics, delves deeper into using NGINX as a reverse proxy to solve scaling issues and performance problems.
Chapter 6, The NGINX HTTP Server, describes how to use the various modules included with NGINX to solve common webserving problems.
Chapter 7, NGINX for the Application Developer, shows how NGINX can be integrated with your application to deliver content to your users more quickly.
Chapter 8, Integrating Lua with NGINX, provides a brief look at how to extend NGINX functionality using the embedded Lua scripting language.
Chapter 9, Troubleshooting Techniques, investigates some common configuration problems, how to debug a problem once it arises, and makes some suggestions for performance tuning.
Appendix A, Directive Reference, provides a handy reference for the configuration directives used throughout the book, as well as a selection of others not previously covered.
Appendix B, The Rewrite Rule Guide, describes how to use the NGINX rewrite module and describes a few simple steps for converting Apache-style rewrite rules into ones NGINX can process.
Appendix C, The NGINX Community, introduces you to the online resources available to seek more information.
Appendix D, Persisting Solaris Network Tunings, details what is necessary to persist different network tuning changes under Solaris 10 and above.
Any modern Linux PC should be sufficient to run the code samples in the book. The installation instructions are given in each chapter that uses code samples. Basically, it boils down to:
The build environment (compiler, header files, and so on)
NGINX (the most recent version should be fine)
Ruby (best installed from https://rvm.io)
Perl (the default version should be fine)
You are an experienced systems administrator or systems engineer, familiar with installing and configuring servers to meet specific needs. You do not need experience using NGINX.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "This section will be placed at the top of the nginx.conf configuration file."
A block of code is set as follows:
http {
include /opt/local/etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
server_names_hash_max_size 1024;
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ mkdir $HOME/build $ cd $HOME/build && tar xzf nginx-<version-number>.tar.gz
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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