Book Image

Nginx Module Extension

By : Usama Dar
Book Image

Nginx Module Extension

By: Usama Dar

Overview of this book

<p>Companies can solve significant scaling issues thanks to switching their web platforms to Nginx. A popular web server for building web infrastructure, Nginx transparently and effectively enables the growth of the largest sites on the Internet today, on top of being free and open source.</p> <p>This book is a practical reference providing you with everything you need to know about Nginx module extensions. You will learn how to write powerful and flexible configuration files and your own modules, as well as gaining knowledge about Nginx’s modular architecture, available modules, and their intricate details.</p> <p>Nginx Module Extension starts by teaching you to compile the Nginx source on multiple platforms. Then you will learn the synopsis, directives, and practical examples of the core, optional, and third party Nginx modules before familiarizing yourself with Nginx internals, enabling you to write custom modules.</p> <p>You will learn about the flexibility of the Nginx configuration and how to enable and disable various options while building from the source. You will learn to customize the Main and Events module to fine-tune the web server performance, and you will also learn about standard and optional HTTP modules like GeoIP, Gzip, Access Control, and using SSL, along with an exploration of PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Memcached modules. Finally you will learn internals like module chaining and will see sample code and a line-by-line walkthrough demonstrating how to write your own module.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Chapter 3. Installing and Configuring HTTP Modules

In this chapter, we will explore the installation and configuration of standard HTTP modules. Standard HTTP modules are built into Nginx by default unless you disable them while running the configure script. The optional HTTP modules are only installed if you specify them explicitly while running configure. These modules deal with functionalities such as SSL, HTTP authentication, HTTP proxy, gzip compression, and many others. We will look at some optional HTTP modules in the next chapter.

All the configuration directives we have talked about so far and the ones that we will be discussing in this and the remaining chapters are specified in the nginx.conf file. The default location of this file is /usr/local/conf/nginx.conf.