Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server, Third Edition

By : Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server, Third Edition

By: Clement Nedelcu

Overview of this book

Nginx is a lightweight HTTP server designed for high-traffic websites, with network scalability as the primary objective. With the advent of high speed Internet access, short loading times and fast transfer rates have become a necessity. This free, open source solution will either come as a full replacement of other software such as Apache, or stand in front of your existing infrastructure to improve its overall speed. This book is a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in different ways that correspond to actual production situations: as a standalone server, as a reverse proxy, interacting with applications via FastCGI, and more. In addition, this complete directive reference will be your best friend at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes. This book is the perfect companion for both Nginx beginners and experienced administrators. For beginners, it will take you through the complete process of setting up this lightweight HTTP server on your system and configuring its various modules so it does exactly what you need quickly and securely. For more experienced administrators, this book provides different approaches that can help you make the most of your current infrastructure. Nginx can be employed in many situations, whether you are looking to construct an entirely new web-serving architecture or simply want to integrate an efficient tool to optimize your site loading speeds.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Nginx HTTP Server Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The HTTP Core module


The HTTP Core module is the component that contains all the fundamental blocks, directives, and variables of the HTTP server. It's enabled by default when you configure the build (as described in Chapter 1, Downloading and Installing Nginx), but as it turns out, it's actually optional—you can decide not to include it in your custom build. Doing so will completely disable all the HTTP functionalities, and all the other HTTP modules will not be compiled. However, if you've purchased this book it's highly likely that you are interested in the web-serving capacities of Nginx, so you will have this enabled.

This module is the largest of all the standard Nginx modules—it provides an impressive amount of directives and variables. In order to understand all these new elements and how they come into play, we first need to understand the logical organization introduced by the three main blocks—http, server, and location.

Structure blocks

In the previous chapter, we discovered the...