Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Second Edition

By : Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Second Edition

By: Clement Nedelcu

Overview of this book

<p>Nginx is a lightweight HTTP server designed for high-traffic websites, with network scalability as the primary objective. With the advent of high speed Internet access, short loading times and fast transfer rates have become a necessity. This free, open source solution will either come as a full replacement of other software such as Apache, or stand in front of your existing infrastructure to improve its overall speed.</p> <p>"Nginx HTTP Server - Second Edition" provides a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in different ways that correspond to actual production situations: as a standalone server, as a reverse proxy, interacting with applications via FastCGI and more. In addition, the complete directive reference will be your best friend at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes.</p> <p>This book is the perfect companion for both Nginx beginners and experienced administrators. For beginners, it will take you through the complete process of setting up this lightweight HTTP server on your system and configuring its various modules to get it to do exactly what you need, in a fast and secure way. For more experienced administrators, this book provides different angles of approach that can help you make the most of your current infrastructure. Nginx can be employed in many situations, whether you are looking to construct an entirely new web-serving architecture or simply want to integrate an efficient tool to optimize your site loading speeds.</p> <p>This book takes you through the setup and configuration of Nginx by detailing every step of the way, from downloading to configuring your server in a selection of common architectures.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Nginx HTTP Server Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Directive Index
Index

A configuration for your profile


Following this long list of directives from the base modules, we can begin to envision a first configuration adapted to your profile in terms of targeted traffic and, more importantly, to your hardware. In this section, we will first take a closer look at the default configuration file to understand the implications of each setting.

Understanding the default configuration

There is a reason why Nginx stands apart from other web servers—it's extremely lightweight, optimized, and to put it simply, it's fast. As such, the default configuration is efficient, and in many cases, you will not need to apply radical changes to the initial setup.

We will study the default configuration by opening up the main configuration file nginx.conf, although you will find this file to be almost empty. The reason lies in the fact that when a directive does not appear in the configuration file, the default value is employed. We will thus consider the default values here as well as...