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

Securing communications with HTTPS


Implementing HTTPS support is becoming an increasingly important requirement in the modern Web. Visitors no longer trust online stores that don't secure communications, and all of the major actors of the industry are slowly eradicating plain-text transmissions. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all default to HTTPS now. Google has even announced that their search engine will promote websites that offer HTTPS support. There isn't any reason left to skip this part, and Nginx makes it particularly easy. We will thus expand on the example in the previous section, and enable HTTPS support on our WordPress site; please note however that the guide remains valid regardless of the application you are securing.

Self-signed certificates and certificate authorities

In order to enable HTTPS, we have to obtain an SSL certificate which will contain information pertaining to the domain name that we wish to secure. There are two types of certificates that you may set up for your...