The 2000s have been the decade of server-side technologies. Over the past fifteen years or so, an overwhelming majority of websites have migrated from simple static HTML content to highly and fully dynamic pages, taking the Web to an entirely new level in terms of interaction with visitors. Software solutions emerged quickly, including open source ones, and some became mature enough to process high-traffic websites. In this chapter, we will study the ability of Nginx to interact with these applications. We have selected two for different reasons. The first one is obviously PHP. According to a January 2013 Netcraft survey, nearly 40 percent of the World Wide Web is powered by PHP. The second one is Python. The reason being the way it's installed and configured to work with Nginx. The mechanism effortlessly applies to other applications such as Perl or Ruby on Rails.
This chapter covers the following topics:
Discovering the CGI and FastCGI technologies
The...