Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server, Third Edition

By : Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server, Third Edition

By: Clement 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 free, open source solution will either come as a full replacement of other software such as Apache, or stand in front of your existing infrastructure to improve its overall speed. This book is a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in different 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 directive reference will be your best friend at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes. 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 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 (17 chapters)
Nginx HTTP Server Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The Rewrite module


This module, in particular, brings much more functionality to Nginx than a simple set of directives. It defines a whole new level of request processing that will be explained throughout this section.

Basically, the purpose of this module (as the name suggests) is to perform URL rewriting. This mechanism allows you to get rid of ugly URLs containing multiple parameters. For instance, http://example.com/article.php?id=1234&comment=32—such URLs are particularly uninformative and meaningless for a regular visitor. Instead, links to your website will contain useful information that indicates the nature of the page the visitor is about to visit. The URL given in the example becomes http://website.com/article-1234-32-US-economy-strengthens.html. This solution is not only more interesting for your visitors, but also for search engines—URL rewriting is a key element of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The principle behind this mechanism is simple—it consists of rewriting the...