Mastering NGINX, 2nd Edition

Key Features

• Get tips, tricks, and master insight to help you configure NGINX for any server situation
• Integrate NGINX into your applications architecture with is, using hands-on guidance and practical code samples that are free to use
• Troubleshoot configuration problems before and as they arise, for a seamless NGINX server experience

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• 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 to get speedier user interaction
• Integrate popular PHP frameworks with the FastCGI module
• Construct useful logging configurations

About the Author

Dimitri Aivaliotis is a production engineer in Silicon Valley. His career has taken him from building a Linux-based computer network for a school up through multi-datacenter, high-availability infrastructures for banks and popular websites. He has spent over a decade solving his customers’ problems and learned NGINX along the way.

Dimitri graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and received an MS in Management Information Systems at Florida State University.

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 Application Developer
Chapter 8. Integrating Lua with NGINX
Chapter 9. Troubleshooting Techniques