Mastering Nginx

An in-depth guide to configuring NGINX for any situation, including numerous examples and reference tables describing each directive

Overview

• An in-depth configuration guide to help you understand how to best configure NGINX for any situation.
• Includes useful code samples to help you integrate NGINX into your application architecture.
• Full of example configuration snippets, best-practice descriptions, and reference tables for each directive.

In Detail

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server and mail proxy designed to use very few system resources. With the many tutorials and example configurations floating around the Web, it is difficult to know how to properly configure NGINX to meet your expectations.

“Mastering Nginx” will serve to clarify the murky waters of NGINX configuration, helping you learn how to tune NGINX for various situations, what some of the more obscure configuration directives do, and how to design a decent configuration to match your needs.

Beginning with an overview of compiling NGINX and describing its basic configuration file format, this guide next takes you on a tour of NGINX’s modules.

From the unique mail module to the upstream module, this book explores the various possibilities of using NGINX as a reverse proxy. The multiple HTTP modules are explained, and the book rounds off the tour with a discussion of troubleshooting.

“Mastering Nginx” will explain all aspects of configuring NGINX to help solve your hosting problems.

What you will learn from this book

• Compile the right third party module to meet your needs.
• Write an authentication server to use with the mail proxy module.
• Create your own SSL certificates to encrypt connections.
• Use try_files to solve your file-existence check problems.
• Cache and compress responses for speedier user-interaction.
• Integrate popular PHP frameworks with the FastCGI module.
• Construct useful logging configurations.
• Troubleshoot configuration problems as they arise.

Approach

This book is a practical step-by-step tutorial with well-explained code snippets, best-practice tips, and reference tables.

Who this book is written for

If you are an experienced systems administrator or systems engineer, familiar with installing and configuring servers to meet specific needs and want to master NGINX, then this book is for you. You do not need to have experience using NGINX already.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules
Chapter 2: A Configuration Guide
Chapter 3: Using the Mail Module
Chapter 4: NGINX as a Reverse Proxy
Chapter 5: Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics
Chapter 6: The NGINX HTTP Server
Chapter 7: NGINX for the Developer
Chapter 8: Troubleshooting Techniques
Appendix A: Directive Reference
Appendix B: Rewrite Rule Guide
Appendix C: The NGINX Community
Appendix D: Persisting Solaris Network Tunings