Apache and Nginx are two popular open source web servers. Both are very powerful, but at the same time have their own disadvantages as well. Apache is not good at handling high load environments with multiple concurrent requests and Nginx does not have inbuilt support for dynamic content processing. Many administrators overcome these problems by using both Apache and Nginx together. Nginx handles all incoming requests and only passes requests for dynamic content to Apache. Additionally, Nginx can provide a catching option which enables the server to respond to a request with results from a similar previous request. This helps to reduce the overall response time and minimize the load sent to Apache.
In this recipe, we will learn how to set up a web server configured with a reverse proxy. We will use Nginx as a reverse proxy, which will serve all static content and pass the requests for dynamic content to Apache.