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)

Rewrite rules


The most common source of worries during an HTTP server switch is the rewrite rules. Unfortunately, Nginx is not directly compatible with the Apache rewrite rules in two regards:

  • Usually, rewrite rules are placed within .htaccess files, as discussed in the previous section. Nginx offers no such mechanism, so rewrite rules will have to be placed in a different location.
  • The syntax of the rewrite instructions and conditions is quite different and will need to be adapted. Thankfully, the regular expression syntax does not change.

This section will explore some of the issues encountered when porting rules to Nginx, and then will provide some prewritten rules for a couple of major web applications.

General remarks

Before studying practical examples, let us begin with a couple of important remarks regarding rewrite rules in Nginx.

On the location

With all that has been said and written about Nginx, we can safely say that it's not the most appropriate web server for web hosting companies...