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.

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Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Dimitri Aivaliotis
Jul, 2016 | 320 pages
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Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules
Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules
Installing NGINX using a package manager
Installing NGINX from source
Configuring SSL support
Enabling various modules
Finding and installing third-party modules
Adding support for Lua
Putting it all together
Summary
2
A Configuration Guide
A Configuration Guide
The basic configuration format
NGINX global configuration parameters
Using the include files
The HTTP server section
The virtual server section
Locations – where, when, and how
Full sample configuration
Summary
3
Using the mail Module
Using the mail Module
Basic proxy service
Authentication service
Combining with memcached
Interpreting log files
Operating system limits
Summary
4
NGINX as a Reverse Proxy
NGINX as a Reverse Proxy
Introducing reverse proxying
The proxy module
Legacy servers with cookies
The upstream module
Keepalive connections
Types of upstream servers
Single upstream server
Multiple upstream servers
Non-HTTP upstream servers
Load-balancing
Converting an if-fy configuration to a more modern interpretation
Using error documents to handle upstream problems
Determining the client's real IP address
Summary
5
Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics
Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics
Security through separation
Isolating application components for scalability
Reverse proxy performance tuning
Summary
6
The NGINX HTTP Server
The NGINX HTTP Server
NGINX's architecture
The HTTP core module
Using limits to prevent abuse
Restricting access
Streaming media files
Predefined variables
SPDY and HTTP/2
Using NGINX with PHP-FPM
Wiring NGINX and uWSGI together
Summary
7
NGINX for the Application Developer
NGINX for the Application Developer
Caching integration
Changing content on-the-fly
Using Server Side Includes
Decision-making in NGINX
Creating a secure link
Generating images
Tracking website visitors
Preventing inadvertent code execution
Summary
8
Integrating Lua with NGINX
Integrating Lua with NGINX
The ngx_lua module
Integrating with Lua
Logging with Lua
Summary
9
Troubleshooting Techniques
Troubleshooting Techniques
Analyzing log files
Configuring advanced logging
Common configuration errors
Operating system limits
Performance problems
Using the Stub Status module
Summary
Directive Reference
Directive Reference
The Rewrite Rule Guide
The Rewrite Rule Guide
Introducing the rewrite module
Creating new rewrite rules
Translating from Apache
Summary
The NGINX Community
The NGINX Community
NGINX Plus
Mailing list
IRC channel
Web resources
Writing a good bug report
Summary
Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
Index
Index

Using the Stub Status module

NGINX provides an introspection module that outputs certain statistics about how it is running. This module is called stub_status and is enabled with the --with-http_stub_status_module configure flag.

To see the statistics produced by this module, the stub_status directive needs to be set to on. A separate location directive should be created for this module so that an ACL may be applied:

location /nginx_status {

    stub_status on;

    access_log off;

    allow 127.0.0.1;

    deny all;

}

Calling this URI from the localhost (for example, with curl http://localhost/nginx_status) will show output similar to the following lines:

Active connections: 2532
server accepts handled requests
1476737983 1476737983 3553635810
Reading: 93 Writing: 13 Waiting: 2426

Here we see that there are 2,532 open connections, of which NGINX is currently reading the request header of 93, and 13 connections are in a state in which NGINX is either reading the request body, processing...

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