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

Using Nginx as a TCP load balancer


Until recently, the open source version of Nginx would only allow load balancing in the context of HTTP requests. In the meantime, the commercial subscription NGINX+ took the concept one step further: using Nginx as a TCP load balancer. This would pave the way to much broader possibilities: you could then set up Nginx to distribute load across any form of networked servers—database servers, e-mail servers— literally everything that communicates via TCP. In May 2015, the authors decided that TCP load balancing should be part of the open-source version; as of Nginx 1.9.0 the Stream module is included in the source code readily available on Nginx.org.

The Stream module

The way TCP load balancing works in Nginx is remarkably similar to HTTP load balancing. However, since the module that brings forth the new set of directives is not included in the default build, you will need to run the configure command with the following flag before building the program: -...