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

Summary


In this chapter, we saw how NGINX can be used effectively as a reverse proxy. It can act in three roles, either individually or in some combination, which is to enhance security, to enable scalability, and/or to enhance performance. Security is achieved through separation of the application from the end user. NGINX can be combined with multiple upstream servers to achieve scalability. The performance of an application relates directly to how responsive it is to a user's request. We explored different mechanisms to achieve a more responsive application. Faster response times mean happier users.

Up next is an exploration of NGINX as an HTTP server. We have so far only discussed how NGINX can act as a reverse proxy, but there is so much more that NGINX is capable of.