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)

Installing a log parser


While Nginx has great logs, at some of the higher levels of logging, they can also be quite exhaustive in the amount of information they log. A good way to not miss information and get a high level overview of what is going on with Nginx is to install a log parser that can aggregate information and display it in a more approachable format.

Note

One open source tool we can use for this is called GoAccess, and can be found on their website at https://goaccess.io/.

The good thing about GoAccess, aside from being free and open source, is that it can be accessed through both the Terminal and your browser. Therefore, it can function as both a monitoring tool that you run in your Terminal and as a reporting tool that generates a kind of dashboard for your stats:

To get started and install GoAccess, you can either check your distribution package manager or download and compile it manually:

wget http://tar.goaccess.io/goaccess-1.2.tar.gz
tar -xzvf goaccess-1.2.tar.gz
cd goaccess...