Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Dimitri Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Dimitri Aivaliotis

Overview of this book

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server and mail proxy designed to use very few system resources. But despite its power it is often a challenge to properly configure NGINX to meet your expectations. Mastering Nginx is the solution – an insider’s guide that will clarify the murky waters of NGINX’s configuration. Tune NGINX for various situations, improve your NGINX experience with some of the more obscure configuration directives, and discover how to design and personalize a configuration to match your needs. To begin with, quickly brush up on installing and setting up the NGINX server on the OS and its integration with third-party modules. From here, move on to explain NGINX's mail proxy module and its authentication, and reverse proxy to solve scaling issues. Then see how to integrate NGINX with your applications to perform tasks. The latter part of the book focuses on working through techniques to solve common web issues and the know-hows using NGINX modules. Finally, we will also explore different configurations that will help you troubleshoot NGINX server and assist with performance tuning.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Directive Reference
Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
Index

Finding and installing third-party modules


As with many open source projects, there is an active developer community surrounding NGINX. Thanks to NGINX's modular nature, this community is able to develop and publish modules to provide additional functionality. They cover a wide range of applications, so it pays to take a look at what is available before embarking on developing your own module.

The procedure for installing a third-party module is fairly straightforward:

  1. Locate the module you would like to use (either search on https://github.com or see http://wiki.nginx.org/3rdPartyModules).

  2. Download the module.

  3. Unpack the source.

  4. Read the README file, if included. See if there are any dependencies that you will need to install.

  5. Configure NGINX to use the module as follows:

    ./configure --add-module=<path>

This procedure will give you an nginx binary with the additional functionality of that module.

Keep in mind that many third-party modules are of an experimental nature. Test using a module first before rolling it out on production systems and remember that the mainline releases of NGINX may have API changes that can cause problems with third-party modules.