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

The HTTP core module


The http module is NGINX's central module; it handles all interactions with clients over HTTP. We already discussed the following aspects of this module in Chapter 2, A Configuration Guide:

  • Client directives

  • File I/O directives

  • Hash directives

  • Socket directives

  • The listen directive

  • Matching a request to a server_name and location directive

We will have a look at the remaining directives in the rest of this section, again divided by type.

The server directive

The server directive starts a new context. We have already seen examples of its usage throughout the book so far. One aspect that has not yet been examined in-depth is the concept of a default server.

A default server in NGINX means that it is the first server defined in a particular configuration with the same listen IP address and port as another server. A default server may also be denoted by the default_server parameter to the listen directive.

The default server is useful to define a set of common directives that will...