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

Using error documents to handle upstream problems


There are situations in which the upstream server cannot respond to a request. In these cases, NGINX can be configured to supply a document from its local disk:

server {

  error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;

  location = /50x.html {

    root share/examples/nginx/html;

  }

}

Or it can also be configured from an external site:

server {

  error_page 500 http://www.example.com/maintenance.html;

}

When proxying to a set of upstream servers, you may want to define an extra upstream as being a fallback server, to handle requests when the others cannot. This is useful in scenarios when the fallback server is able to deliver a customized response based on the requested URI:

upstream app {

  server 127.0.0.1:9000;

  server 127.0.0.1:9001;

  server 127.0.0.1:9002;

}

server {

  location / {

    error_page 500 502 503 504 = @fallback;

    proxy_pass http://app;
  }

  location @fallback {

    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;

  }
}

The =...