Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Dimitri Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Dimitri Aivaliotis

Overview of this book

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server and mail proxy designed to use very few system resources. But despite its power it is often a challenge to properly configure NGINX to meet your expectations. Mastering Nginx is the solution – an insider’s guide that will clarify the murky waters of NGINX’s configuration. Tune NGINX for various situations, improve your NGINX experience with some of the more obscure configuration directives, and discover how to design and personalize a configuration to match your needs. To begin with, quickly brush up on installing and setting up the NGINX server on the OS and its integration with third-party modules. From here, move on to explain NGINX's mail proxy module and its authentication, and reverse proxy to solve scaling issues. Then see how to integrate NGINX with your applications to perform tasks. The latter part of the book focuses on working through techniques to solve common web issues and the know-hows using NGINX modules. Finally, we will also explore different configurations that will help you troubleshoot NGINX server and assist with performance tuning.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Directive Reference
Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
Index

Chapter 3. Using the mail Module

NGINX was designed not only to serve web traffic, but also to provide a means of proxying e-mail services. In this chapter, you will learn how to configure NGINX as an e-mail proxy for POP3, IMAP, and SMTP services. The mail module is useful to those who need to accept a lot of connections, but the backend mailbox infrastructure either isn't capable of handling the load or needs to be protected from direct access to the Internet. The chapter also covers topics such as the authentication service, caching, and interpreting log files, that are of general use, even if an e-mail service doesn't fit your needs.

We will examine running NGINX as a mail proxy server in the following sections:

  • Basic proxy service

  • Authentication service

  • Combining with memcached

  • Interpreting log files

  • Operating system limits