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

Decision-making in NGINX


You may find yourself trying to bend NGINX's configuration directives in ways that they were not meant to be used. This is frequently seen in configurations where there are a lot of if checks to try to emulate some sort of logic chain. A better option would be to use NGINX's embedded perl module. With this module, you will be able to use the flexibility of Perl to achieve your configuration goals.

The perl module is not built by default, so it needs to be enabled with the --with-http_perl_module configure switch. A minimum of Perl 5.6.1 is required. Ensure as well that your Perl was built with -Dusemultiplicity=yes (or -Dusethreads=yes) and -Dusemymalloc=no. NGINX configuration reloads will cause the perl module to leak memory over time, so this last parameter is included to help mitigate that problem.

After having built NGINX with embedded Perl, the following directives are available:

Perl module directives

Explanation

perl

This directive activates a Perl handler...