Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

By : Dipankar Sarkar

Buy this Book

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

By: Dipankar Sarkar

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Nginx is an open source high-performance web server, which has gained quite some popularity recently. Due to its modular architecture and small footprint, it has been the default choice for a lot of smaller Web 2.0 companies for use as a load-balancing proxy server. It supports most of the existing back-end web protocols like FCGI, WSGI, and SCGI. This book is for you if you want to have in-depth knowledge of the Nginx server. Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook covers the whole range of techniques that would prove useful for you in setting up a very effective web application with the Nginx web server. It has recipes for lesser-known applications of Nginx like a mail proxy server, streaming of video files, image resizing on the fly, and much more. The first chapter of the book covers the basics that would be useful for anyone who is starting with Nginx. Each recipe is designed to be independent of the others. The book has recipes based on broad areas such as core, logging, rewrites, security, and others. We look at ways to optimize your Nginx setup, setting up your WordPress blog, blocking bots that post spam on your site, setting up monitoring using munin, and much more. Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook makes your entry into the Nginx world easy with step-by-step recipes for nearly all the tasks necessary to run your own web application.

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

The Core HTTP Module

Introduction

Installing new modules and compiling Nginx

Running Nginx in debug mode

Easy reloading of Nginx using the CLI

Splitting configuration files for better management

Setting up multiple virtual hosts

Setting up a default catch-all virtual host

Using wildcards in virtual hosts

Setting up the number of worker processes correctly

Increasing the size of uploaded files

Using dynamic SSI for simple sites

Adding content before and after a particular page

Enabling auto indexing of a directory

Serving any random web page from a directory

Serving cookies for identifying and logging users

Re-encoding the response to another encoding

Enabling Gzip compression on some content types

Setting up 404 and other error pages

All About Rewrites: The Rewrite Module

Introduction

Setting up a simple redirect

Using variables in your rewrite

Using cookies for your rewrites

Using browser agents for your rewrites

Using rate limits as a condition for rewrites

Blocking requests based on HTTP referrers

Serving maintenance page when deploying

Setting up a WordPress site with static file serving

Setting up a Drupal site with static file serving

Setting up a Magento site with static file serving

Converting your Apache's .htaccess into Nginx rewrites

Using maps to make configurations cleaner

Get It All Logged: The Logging Module

Introduction

Setting up error log path and levels

Logging it like Apache

Disabling logging of 404 in error logs

Using different logging profiles in the same setup

Enabling a log file cache

Utilizing separate error logs per virtual host

Setting up log rotation

Enabling remote logging with syslog-ng

Setting up your custom logs for easy parsing

Slow Them Down: Access and Rate Limiting Module

Introduction

Limiting requests for any given session

Blocking and allowing access using IP

Setting up simple rate limiting for a download directory

Rate limiting search engine bots

Setting up GeoIP using the MaxMind country database

Using the GeoIP module to set up access and rate control

Let's be Secure: Security Modules

Introduction

Setting up HTTP auth for access control

Generating a secure link for files

Setting up HTTPS for a simple site

Using non standard error codes for debugging SSL setup

Using wildcard certificates with multiple servers

Using Nginx SSL variables for rewrite rules

Setting Up Applications: FCGI and WSGI Modules

Introduction

Setting up a PHP FCGI site

Setting up a Python site using uWSGI

Modifying FCGI timeouts

Utilizing FCGI cache to speed it up

Using multiple FCGI backends

Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

Introduction

Using Nginx as a simple reverse proxy

Setting up a rails site using Nginx as a reverse proxy

Setting up correct reverse proxy timeouts

Setting up caching on the reverse proxy

Using multiple backends for the reverse proxy

Serving CGI files using thttpd and Nginx

Setting up load balancing with reverse proxy

Splitting requests based on various conditions using split-clients

Improving Performance and SEO Using Nginx

Introduction

Setting up TCP options correctly for optimizing performance

Reducing the keep-alives to free up Nginx workers

Using Memcached as the cache backend

Configuring the right event model and file limits

Setting max-age expiry headers for client-side caching

Blocking scrapers, bots, and spiders to save bandwidth

Redirection of www to non-www domain for SEO

Removing all white space from response

Setting up server status for monitoring

Setting up Munin for 24x7 Nginx monitoring

Enabling GZIP pre-compression

Preventing hotlinking using Nginx

Using embedded Perl to minify JavaScript files

Using embedded Perl to minify CSS files

Using embedded Perl to serve sitemaps (SEO)

Setting up Boost module on Drupal with Nginx

Setting up streaming for Flash files

Utilizing the 1x1 GIF serving module to do offline processing

Using Other Third-party Modules

Introduction

Setting up an IMAP/POP3 proxy server

Setting up authentication for mail services

Setting up SSL for mail authentication

Using Nginx as a WEBDAV reverse proxy

Dynamic image resizing using Nginx

Replacing and searching text in Nginx response

Assembling ZIP files on the fly

Using Nginx as a HTTP publish-subscribe server

Transforming XML responses using XSLT templates

Setting up Etags for static content

Easy logging of page load times

Streaming of MP4/H.264 files

Setting up SCGI sites

Setting up expiring links

Some More Third-party Modules

Introduction

Configuring a fair load balancing

Setting up health checks for backend servers

Tracking and reporting file upload progress

Generating circles for round edges using Nginx

Running Python using Phusion Passenger

Generating graphs directly from RRDtool in Nginx

Using Google performance tools

Serving content directly from GridFS

Configuring Basic HTTP auth using PAM

Configuring Basic HTTP auth using Kerberos

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

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3 star

2 star

1 star

Increasing the size of uploaded files

Usually when you are running a site where the user uploads a lot of files, you will see that when they upload a file which is more than 1MB in size you get an Nginx error stating, "Request entity too Large" (413), as shown in the following screenshot. We will look at how Nginx can be configured to handle larger uploads.

How to do it...

This is controlled by one simple part of the Nginx configuration. You can simply paste this in the server part of the Nginx configuration:

client_max_body_size 100M; # M stands for megabytes

This preceding configuration will allow you to upload a 100 megabyte file. Anything more than that, and you will receive a 413. You can set this to any value which is less than the available disk space to Nginx, which is primarily because Nginx downloads the file to a temporary location before forwarding it to the backend application.

There's more...

Nginx also lets us control other factors related to people uploading files on the web application, like timeouts in case the client has a slow connection. A slow client can keep one of your application threads busy and thus potentially slow down your application. This is a problem that is experienced on all the heavy multimedia user-driven sites, where the consumer uploads all kinds of rich data such as images, documents, videos, and so on. So it is sensible to set low timeouts.

client_body_timeout 60; # parameter in seconds
client_body_buffer_size 8k;
client_header_timeout 60; # parameter in seconds
client_header_buffer_size 1k;

So, here the first two settings help you control the timeout when the body is not received at one read-step (basically, if the server is queried and no response comes back). Similarly, you can set the timeout for the HTTP header as well. The following table lists out the various directives and limits you can set around client uploading.

Directive	Use
`client_body_in_file_only`	This directive forces Nginx to always store a client request body in temporary disk files, even if the file size is 0. The file will not be removed at request completion.
`client_body_in_single_buffer`	This directive specifies whether to keep the whole body in a single client request buffer.
`client_body_buffer_size`	This directive specifies the client request body buffer size. If the request body is more than the buffer, then the entire request body or some part is written in a temporary file.
`client_body_temp_path`	This directive assigns the directory for storing the temporary files in it with the body of the request.
`client_body_timeout`	This directive sets the read timeout for the request body from client.
`client_header_buffer_size`	This directive sets the header buffer size for the request header from client.
`client_header_timeout`	This directive assigns timeout with reading of the title of the request of client.
`client_max_body_size`	This directive assigns the maximum accepted body size of client request, indicated by the line Content-Length in the header of request.

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

By : Dipankar Sarkar

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

By: Dipankar Sarkar

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

Increasing the size of uploaded files

How to do it...

There's more...