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

Common configuration errors


The next step in troubleshooting a problem is to take a look at the configuration to see whether it actually achieves the goal you are trying to accomplish. NGINX configurations have been floating around the Internet for a number of years. Often, they were designed for an older version of NGINX, and to solve a specific problem. Unfortunately, these configurations are copied without really understanding the problem they were designed to solve. There is sometimes a better way to solve the same problem, using a newer configuration.

Using if instead of try_files

One such case is a situation in which a user wants to deliver a static file if it is found on the filesystem, and if not, to pass the request on to a FastCGI server:

server {

  root /var/www/html;

  location / {

    if (!-f $request_filename) {

      include fastcgi_params;

      fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

      break;

    }

  }

}

This was the way this problem was commonly solved before NGINX had the...