Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Dimitri Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Dimitri 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 (20 chapters)
Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Directive Reference
Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
Index

The upstream module


Closely paired with the proxy module is the upstream module. The upstream directive starts a new context in which a group of upstream servers is defined. These servers may be given different weights (the higher the weight, the greater the number of connections NGINX will pass to that particular upstream server), may be of different types (TCP versus UNIX domain), and may even be marked as down for maintenance reasons.

The following table summarizes the directives valid within the upstream context:

The upstream module directives

Explanation

ip_hash

This directive ensures the distribution of connecting clients evenly over all servers by hashing the IP address, keying on its class-C network.

keepalive

This directive specifies the number of connections to the upstream servers that are cached per worker process. When used with the HTTP connections, proxy_http_version should be set to 1.1 and proxy_set_header to Connection "".

least_conn

This directive activates...