Book Image

Nginx Module Extension

By : Usama Dar
Book Image

Nginx Module Extension

By: Usama Dar

Overview of this book

<p>Companies can solve significant scaling issues thanks to switching their web platforms to Nginx. A popular web server for building web infrastructure, Nginx transparently and effectively enables the growth of the largest sites on the Internet today, on top of being free and open source.</p> <p>This book is a practical reference providing you with everything you need to know about Nginx module extensions. You will learn how to write powerful and flexible configuration files and your own modules, as well as gaining knowledge about Nginx’s modular architecture, available modules, and their intricate details.</p> <p>Nginx Module Extension starts by teaching you to compile the Nginx source on multiple platforms. Then you will learn the synopsis, directives, and practical examples of the core, optional, and third party Nginx modules before familiarizing yourself with Nginx internals, enabling you to write custom modules.</p> <p>You will learn about the flexibility of the Nginx configuration and how to enable and disable various options while building from the source. You will learn to customize the Main and Events module to fine-tune the web server performance, and you will also learn about standard and optional HTTP modules like GeoIP, Gzip, Access Control, and using SSL, along with an exploration of PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Memcached modules. Finally you will learn internals like module chaining and will see sample code and a line-by-line walkthrough demonstrating how to write your own module.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Standard HTTP modules


As mentioned earlier, standard HTTP modules are built into Nginx by default unless you explicitly disable them. As the name suggests, these modules provide standard HTTP functionality to the web server. We will now have a look at some of the important standard HTTP modules.

The core module (HttpCoreModule)

The core module deals with the core HTTP features. This includes the protocol version, HTTP keepalive, location (different configurations based on URI), documents' roots, and so on. There are over 74 configuration directives and over 30 environment variables related to the HTTP Core module. We will discuss the most important ones briefly.

Explaining directives

The following is an explanation of some of the key core module directives. This list is not exhaustive, and you can find the full list at http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule.

server

The server directive defines the server context. It is defined as a server {...} block in the configuration file. Each server block...