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)

Enabling HTTP/2 on NGINX

The now ratified HTTP/2 standard is based on SPDY, an experimental protocol that Google developed internally. As shown in the diagram in the previous recipe, establishing an HTTPS connection can be quite time consuming. With HTTP/1.1, each connection to the web server must follow this process and wait for the handshake to complete.

In HTTP/2, this handshake time is reduced, but more importantly the requests are multiplexed over a single TCP connection. This means that the handshake only has to occur once, significantly reducing the latency of a site for the end user. In fact, it means that an HTTP/2-based site can actually be quicker than a standard HTTP-based one.

There are a number of other benefits that HTTP/2 also provides, such as header compression, a new binary protocol, and a server-based push. All of these further increase the efficiency of HTTP...