It is a well-known fact that the market of web servers has a long-established leader: Apache. According to recent surveys, as of January 2013, over 55 percent of the World Wide Web is served by this eighteen-year old open source application. However, for the past few years, the same reports reveal the rise of a new competitor: Nginx, a lightweight HTTP server originating from Russia (pronounced engine X). There have been many interrogations surrounding this young web server. Why has the blogosphere become so effervescent about it? What is the reason causing so many server administrators to switch to Nginx since the beginning of 2009? Is this tiny piece of software mature enough to run my high-traffic website?
To begin with, Nginx is not as young as one might think. Originally started in 2002, the project was first carried out by a standalone developer, Igor Sysoev, for the needs of an extremely high-traffic Russian website, namely Rambler, which as of September 2008, received over 500 million HTTP requests per day. The application is now used to serve some of the most popular websites on the Web such as Facebook, Netflix, WordPress, SourceForge, and many more. Nginx has proven to be a very efficient, lightweight, yet powerful web server.
Along the chapters of this book, you will discover the many features of Nginx and progressively understand why so many administrators have decided to place their trust in this new HTTP server, often at the expense of Apache. There are many aspects in which Nginx is more efficient than its competitors are. Primarily, speed. Making use of asynchronous sockets, Nginx does not spawn processes as many times as it receives requests. One process per core suffices to handle thousands of connections, allowing for a much lighter CPU load and memory consumption. Secondly, ease of use. Configuration files are much simpler to read and tweak than with other web server solutions such as Apache. A couple of lines are enough to set up a complete virtual host configuration.
Last but not least, modularity. Not only is Nginx a completely open source project released under a BSD-like license, but it also comes with a powerful plug-in system—referred to as "modules." A large variety of modules are included with the original distribution archive, and many third-party ones can be downloaded online. Overall, Nginx combines speed, efficiency, and power, providing you the perfect ingredients for a successful web server. It appears to be the best Apache alternative as of today.
Although Nginx is available for Windows since version 0.7.52, it is common knowledge that Linux, or BSD-based distributions, are preferred for hosting production sites. During the various processes described in this book, we will therefore assume that you are hosting your website on a Linux operating system such as Debian, CentOS, or other well-known distributions.
Chapter 1, Downloading and Installing Nginx, guides you through the setup process, by downloading and installing Nginx as well as its prerequisites.
Chapter 2, Basic Nginx Configuration, helps you discover the fundamentals of Nginx configuration and set up the Core module.
Chapter 3, HTTP Configuration, details the HTTP Core module which contains most of the major configuration sections and directives.
Chapter 4, Module Configuration, helps you discover the many first-party modules of Nginx among which are the Rewrite and the SSI modules.
Chapter 5, PHP and Python with Nginx, explains how to set up PHP and other third-party applications (if you are interested in serving dynamic websites) to work together with Nginx via FastCGI.
Chapter 6, Apache and Nginx Together, teaches you how to set up Nginx as a reverse proxy server working together with Apache.
Chapter 7, From Apache to Nginx, provides a detailed guide to switching from Apache to Nginx.
Appendix A, Directive Index, lists and describes all configuration directives, sorted alphabetically. Module directives are also described in their respective chapters too.
Appendix B, Module Reference, lists available modules.
Appendix C, Troubleshooting, discusses the most common issues that administrators face when they configure Nginx.
Nginx is a free and open source software running under various operating systems: Linux-based, Mac OS, Windows operating systems, and many more. As such, there is no real requirement in terms of software. Nevertheless, in this book, and particularly in the first chapter, we will be working in a Linux environment, so running a Linux-based operating system would be a plus. Prerequisites for compiling the application are further detailed in Chapter 1, Downloading and Installing Nginx.
By covering both early setup stages as well as advanced topics, this book will suit web administrators interested in solutions to optimize their infrastructure; whether they are looking into replacing existing web server software or integrating a new tool cooperating with applications already up and running. If you, your visitors, and your operating system have been disappointed by Apache, this book is exactly what you need.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The process consists of appending certain switches to the configure script that comes with the source code."
A block of code is set as follows:
#user nobody; worker_processes 1;
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
apt-get install nginx
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