Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By : Martin Bjerretoft Fjordvald, Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By: Martin Bjerretoft Fjordvald, Clement Nedelcu

Overview of this book

Nginx is a lightweight HTTP server designed for high-traffic websites, with network scalability as the primary objective. With the advent of high-speed internet access, short loading times and fast transfer rates have become a necessity. This book is a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in ways that correspond to actual production situations: as a standalone server, as a reverse proxy, interacting with applications via FastCGI, and more. In addition, this complete direct reference will be indispensable at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes. This book mainly targets the most recent version of Nginx (1.13.2) and focuses on all the new additions and improvements, such as support for HTTP/2, improved dynamic modules, security enhancements, and support for multiple SSL certificates. This book is the perfect companion for both Nginx beginners and experienced administrators. For beginners, it will take you through the complete process of setting up this lightweight HTTP server on your system and configuring its various modules so that it does exactly what you need quickly and securely. For more experienced administrators, this book provides different approaches that can help you make the most of your current infrastructure. Nginx can be employed in many situations, whether you are looking to construct an entirely new web-serving architecture or simply want to integrate an efficient tool to optimize your site loading speeds.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Module directives

At each of the three levels, directives can be inserted in order to affect the behavior of the web server. The following is a list of all directives that are introduced by the main HTTP module, grouped thematically. For each directive, an indication regarding the context is given. Some cannot be used at certain levels. For instance, it would make no sense to insert a server_name directive at the http block level, since server_name is a directive directly affecting a virtual host—it should only be inserted in the server block.  To that extent, the table indicates the possible levels where each directive is allowed—the http block, the server block, the location block, and additionally the if block, later introduced in the Rewrite module section.

This documentation is valid as of Stable version 1.8.0. Future updates may alter the syntax of some...