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 location block


We have established that Nginx offers you the possibility to fine-tune your configuration down to three levels—at the protocol level (http block), the server level (server block), and the requested URI level (location block). Let us now detail the latter.

Location modifier

Nginx allows you to define location blocks by specifying a pattern that will be matched against the requested document URI.

server {
    server_name website.com;
    location /admin/ {
    # The configuration you place here only applies to
    # http://website.com/admin/
    }
}

Instead of a simple folder name, you can indeed insert complex patterns. The syntax of the location block is:

location [=|~|~*|^~|@] pattern { ... }

The first optional argument is a symbol called location modifier that defines the way Nginx matches the specified pattern, and also defines the very nature of the pattern (simple string or regular expression). The following paragraphs detail the different modifiers and their behavior.

The...