Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By : Martin Bjerretoft Fjordvald, Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By: Martin Bjerretoft Fjordvald, 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 book is a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in 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 direct reference will be indispensable at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes. This book mainly targets the most recent version of Nginx (1.13.2) and focuses on all the new additions and improvements, such as support for HTTP/2, improved dynamic modules, security enhancements, and support for multiple SSL certificates. 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 that 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 (13 chapters)

Location block priorities


This problem frequently occurs when using multiple location blocks in the same server block: configuration does not apply as you thought it would.

As an example, suppose that you want to define a behavior to be applied to all image files that are requested by clients:

location ~* .(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ { 
    # matches any request for GIF/JPG/JPEG/PNG files 
    proxy_pass http://imageserver; # proxy pass to backend 
} 

Later on, you decide to enable automatic indexing of the /images/ directory. Therefore, you decide to create a new location block, matching all requests starting with /images/:

location ^~ /images/ { 
    # matches any request that starts with /images/ 
    autoindex on; 
} 

With this configuration, when a client requests to download /images/square.gif, Nginx will apply the second location's block only. Why not the first one? The reason is that location blocks are processed in a specific order. For more information about location block priorities, refer...