Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Second Edition

By : Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Second Edition

By: Clement Nedelcu

Overview of this book

<p>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.</p> <p>"Nginx HTTP Server - Second Edition" provides 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, the complete directive reference will be your best friend at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes.</p> <p>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 to get it to do exactly what you need, in a fast and secure way. For more experienced administrators, this book provides different angles of approach 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.</p> <p>This book takes you through the setup and configuration of Nginx by detailing every step of the way, from downloading to configuring your server in a selection of common architectures.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Nginx HTTP Server Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Directive Index
Index

SSI module


SSI, for Server Side Includes, is actually a sort of server-side programming language interpreted by Nginx. Its name is based on the fact that the most used functionality of the language is the include command. Back in the 1990s, such languages were employed in order to render web pages dynamic, from simple static .html files with client-side scripts to complex pages with server-processed compositions. Within the HTML source code, webmasters could now insert server-interpreted directives, which would then lead the way to more advanced pre-processors such as PHP or ASP.

The most famous illustration of SSI is the quote of the day. In order to insert a new quote every day at the top of each page of their website, webmasters would have to edit out the HTML source of every page, replacing the former quote manually. With Server Side Includes, a single command suffices to simplify the task:

<html>
<head><title>My web page</title></head>
<body>
  &lt...