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

Summary


We saw how NGINX can be used as a reverse proxy. Its efficient connection-handling model is ideal for interfacing directly with clients. After having terminated requests, NGINX can then open new ones to upstream servers, taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of each upstream server. Using if inside a location is only considered valid under certain situations. By thinking about how NGINX actually handles a request, we can develop a configuration that is more suited to what we want to achieve. If NGINX cannot reach an upstream server for any reason, it can serve another page instead. As NGINX terminates the clients' requests, the upstream servers can obtain information about the client only via headers passed in NGINX's proxied request. These concepts will help you design an ideal NGINX configuration to match your needs.

In the next chapter, we will explore more advanced reverse-proxy techniques.