Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

Dimitri Aivaliotis

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781785283765
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: System Administration
• Index: Computer Science

An in-depth guide to configuring NGINX for your everyday server needsAbout This Book• 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 experienceWho This Book Is ForThis book is for system administrators and engineers who want to personalize NGINX, and design a robust configuration module to solve their hosting problems. Some knowledge of NGINX is a plus, but is not a prerequisite.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 configurationsIn DetailNGINX 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.Style and approachThis is a mastering guide where you will follow an instructional, conversational approach working through problems and their solutions.

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

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Table of Contents

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules

Installing NGINX using a package manager

Installing NGINX on CentOS

Installing NGINX on Debian

Installing NGINX from source

Preparing a build environment

Compiling from source

Table – Common configure options

Table – Configure options for optimization

Configuring for web or mail service

Configure options for a mail proxy

Table: Mail configure options

Configure options to specify paths

Table – HTTP configuration options

Configuring SSL support

Enabling various modules

Table – HTTP module configure options

Disabling unused modules

Table – Disable configure options

Finding and installing third-party modules

Adding support for Lua

Putting it all together

Summary

2. A Configuration Guide

The basic configuration format

NGINX global configuration parameters

Using the include files

The HTTP server section

Client directives

File I/O directives

Hash directives

Socket directives

Sample configuration

The virtual server section

Locations – where, when, and how

Full sample configuration

Summary

3. Using the mail Module

Basic proxy service

The mail server configuration section

POP3 service

IMAP service

SMTP service

Using SSL/TLS

Complete mail example

Authentication service

Combining with memcached

Interpreting log files

Operating system limits

Summary

4. NGINX as a Reverse Proxy

Introducing reverse proxying

The proxy module

Legacy servers with cookies

The upstream module

Keepalive connections

Types of upstream servers

Single upstream server

Multiple upstream servers

Non-HTTP upstream servers

Memcached upstream servers

FastCGI upstream servers

SCGI upstream servers

The uWSGI upstream servers

Load-balancing

Load-balancing algorithms

Converting an if-fy configuration to a more modern interpretation

Using error documents to handle upstream problems

Determining the client's real IP address

Summary

5. Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics

Security through separation

Encrypting traffic with SSL

Authenticating clients using SSL

Blocking traffic based on originating IP address

Isolating application components for scalability

Reverse proxy performance tuning

Buffering data

Caching data

Storing data

Compressing data

Summary

6. The NGINX HTTP Server

NGINX's architecture

The HTTP core module

The server directive

Logging in NGINX

Finding files

Name resolution

Interacting with the client

Using limits to prevent abuse

Restricting access

Streaming media files

Predefined variables

SPDY and HTTP/2

Using NGINX with PHP-FPM

An example Drupal configuration

Wiring NGINX and uWSGI together

An example Django configuration

Summary

7. NGINX for the Application Developer

Caching integration

No application caching

Caching in the database

Caching in the filesystem

Changing content on-the-fly

Using the addition module

The sub module

The xslt module

Using Server Side Includes

Decision-making in NGINX

Creating a secure link

Generating images

Tracking website visitors

Preventing inadvertent code execution

Summary

8. Integrating Lua with NGINX

The ngx_lua module

Integrating with Lua

Logging with Lua

Summary

9. Troubleshooting Techniques

Analyzing log files

The formats of the error_log file

Error log file entry examples

Configuring advanced logging

Debug logging

Switching binaries at runtime

Using access logs for debugging

Common configuration errors

Using if instead of try_files

Using if as a hostname switch

Not using the server context to best effect

Operating system limits

File descriptor limits

Network limits

Performance problems

Using the Stub Status module

Summary

A. Directive Reference

B. T...

Table of contents

• Mastering NGINX - Second Edition