Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By : Fjordvald, Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By: Fjordvald, 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)

Nginx and microservices


Now that we've explored the proxy module in depth, it's time to have a look at what a modern web application architecture might look like. There are entire books dedicated to this topic but we only really need to know how Nginx can enable various setups, and the Nginx part doesn't differ too much between different setups.

For any given task that we need our application to do we have two options, we can either proxy to a backend server like Node.js and have that handle the work, or we can implement it directly in Nginx. Which option you go with depends on a lot of factors, but the two main factors to consider are speed and complexity.

Proxying to a complex backend server has an overhead cost but usually allows you to code reusability and to use package managers such as Packagist and NPM. Conversely, implementing a feature in Nginx puts us closer to the user so we have less overhead but the development itself also becomes more difficult.

Most setups will choose to proxy...