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 ngx_lua module


Similar in intent to the included perl module, the third-party ngx_lua module was made to cover use cases that couldn't be solved with configuration alone. Due to its embeddable design and coroutine (green threading) implementation, Lua serves this purpose well because it doesn't block an entire worker as the perl module can.

The OpenResty project (https://openresty.org/) is the official source of ngx_lua and provides a bundle of NGINX, ngx_lua, a Lua interpreter, plus a number of third-party modules that are useful for turning NGINX into an application server. This is an alternative to the installation instructions detailed in Chapter 1, Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules. After downloading the source, it can be unpacked and installed with the standard ./configure; make; make install command. Here is an example session disabling a number of extra modules, and placing the whole installation under /opt/resty:

$ ./configure \
        --prefix=/opt/resty \
        -...