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 4. Installing Third-party Modules

In this chapter we will explore the installation of third-party modules. Third-party modules are developed by a vast variety of developers around the world and are hosted on various open source repositories such as GitHub and SourceForge. Some of these modules are well tested while others are not quite ready for production. These modules are not officially supported by Nginx developers and might have issues across different Nginx versions. In this chapter, we will talk about some of the most well-known Nginx modules. A bigger list of available options can be browsed on the Nginx website at http://wiki.nginx.org/3rdPartyModules.

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