Book Image

NGINX Cookbook

By : Tim Butler
Book Image

NGINX Cookbook

By: Tim Butler

Overview of this book

NGINX Cookbook covers the basics of configuring NGINX as a web server for use with common web frameworks such as WordPress and Ruby on Rails, through to utilization as a reverse proxy. Designed as a go-to reference guide, this book will give you practical answers based on real-world deployments to get you up and running quickly. Recipes have also been provided for multiple SSL configurations, different logging scenarios, practical rewrites, and multiple load balancing scenarios. Advanced topics include covering bandwidth management, Docker container usage, performance tuning, OpenResty, and the NGINX Plus commercial features. By the time you've read this book, you will be able to adapt and use a wide variety of NGINX implementations to solve any problems you have.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Basic SSL certificates

Before we get started, let's just have a refresher on how the browser-to-server encryption works and what we need to consider. This is a very brief overview specific to a basic web server scenario, so the process can vary for different scenarios:

Following are the steps that happen in a web server scenario:

  1. First, the browser communicates with the web server and requests the start of an SSL handshake. This is also where the browser can let the server know what cipher (encryption) algorithms it will allow.
  2. Next, the server responds to the browser. At this stage, the server will confirm which cipher (based on the list provided by the browser) will be used. The server will also send a copy of the public certificate to the client. The browser will then communicate with the Certificate Authority (CA) to authenticate the certificate.
  3. Next, the key exchange...