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

Single upstream server


The Apache web server is used in common hosting scenarios to serve static files as well as multiple types of interpreted files. The extensive documentation and how-to guides found online help users to get up and running quickly with their favorite CMS. Unfortunately, the typical Apache configuration, due to resource limits, is not able to handle many simultaneous requests. NGINX, though, is designed to handle this kind of traffic and performs very well with little resource consumption. Since most CMSs come preconfigured for Apache, integrating the use of the .htaccess files for extended configuration, the easiest way to take advantage of NGINX's strengths is for NGINX to simply proxy connections to an Apache instance:

server {

  location / {

    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;

  }

}

This is the most basic proxy configuration possible. NGINX will terminate all client connections and then proxy all requests to the local host on TCP port 8080. We assume here that...