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

Additional modules


The first half of this chapter covered two of the most important Nginx modules, namely, the Rewrite module and the SSI module. There are a lot more modules that will greatly enrich the functionality of the web server; they are regrouped here, by thematic.

Among the modules described in this section, some are included in the default Nginx build, but some are not. This implies that unless you specifically configured your Nginx build to include these modules (as described in Chapter 1, Downloading and Installing Nginx), they will not be available to you.

Website access and logging

The following set of modules allows you to configure how visitors access your website and the way your server logs requests.

Index

The Index module provides a simple directive named index, which lets you define the page that Nginx will serve by default if no filename is specified in the client request (in other words, it defines the website index page). You may specify multiple filenames; the first...