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

SSI module


SSI or Server Side Includes, is actually a sort of server-side programming language interpreted by Nginx. Its name originates from the fact that the most-used functionality of the language is the include command. Back in the 1990s, such languages were employed in order to render web pages dynamically, from simple static .html files with client-side scripts to complex pages with server-processed instructions. Within the HTML source code, webmasters could now insert server-interpreted directives, which would then lead the way to much more advanced pre-processors such as PHP or ASP.

The most famous illustration of SSI is the quote of the day example. In order to insert a new quote every day at the top of each page of their website, webmasters would have to edit out the HTML source of every page of the site, updating the old quote manually. With Server Side Includes, a single command suffices to simplify the task:

<html>
<head><title>My web page</title></head...