Table Of ContentNginx HTTP Server
Fourth Edition
Harness the power of Nginx to make the most of your
infrastructure and serve pages faster than ever before
Martin Fjordvald
Clement Nedelcu
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Nginx HTTP Server
Fourth Edition
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Commissioning Editor: Vijin Boricha
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First published: July 2010
Second edition: July 2013
Third edition: November 2015
Fourth edition: February 2018
Production reference: 1120218
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78862-355-1
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To my wife Richole Huang, for her love, patience, and understanding throughout our
marriage.
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Contributors
About the authors
Martin Fjordvald is a 29-year-old Danish entrepreneur who started his company straight
out of high school. Backed by a popular website, he became a jack of all trades having to
deal with the business, programming, and marketing side of his business. The popularity of
his website grew and so did the performance requirements of his code and servers.
He got involved with the community project to document Nginx early on and has written
several blog posts and wiki articles detailing how Nginx works.
Special thanks to the entire Packt team for their patience during the course of writing this
book.
Clement Nedelcu was born in France and studied at UK, French, and Chinese universities.
After teaching computer science, programming, and systems administration at several
eastern Chinese universities, he worked as a technology consultant in France, specialized in
the web and .NET software development as well as Linux server administration. Since 2005,
he has also been administering a major network of websites in his spare time, which
allowed him to discover Nginx. Clement now works as CTO. for a Hong-Kong-based
company developing management software for schools.
About the reviewer
Amet Umerov works as a Linux system engineer with promising start-up. InsideDNA,
which provides cloud-based genomics and data analytics to the biotechnology sector
working on oncology drugs.
Amet develops computing platforms for reproducible research in bioinformatics.
Specifically, he builds and supports highly parallel, scalable, and stable computing
environments for compute-intense analytics. He uses Nginx as the frontend for web
applications and load balancers for Docker environments.
I would like to express my gratitude to my family, friends, and colleagues.
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Table of Contents
Preface
1
Chapter 1: Downloading and Installing Nginx
6
Installing via package managers 6
Nginx provided packages 7
Compiling from source 8
GNU Compiler Collection 9
The PCRE library 10
The zlib library 11
OpenSSL 11
Downloading Nginx 12
Websites and resources 12
Version branches 13
Features 14
Downloading and extracting 15
Configure options 16
The easy way 16
Path options 17
Prerequisite options 20
Module options 22
Modules enabled by default 22
Modules disabled by default 24
Miscellaneous options 26
Configuration examples 28
About the prefix switch 29
Regular HTTP and HTTPS servers 29
All modules enabled 30
Mail server proxy 30
Build configuration issues 31
Make sure you installed the prerequisites 31
Directories exist and are writable 32
Compiling and installing 32
Controlling the Nginx service 33
Daemons and services 33
User and group 33
Nginx command-line switches 34
Table of Contents
Starting and stopping the daemon 34
Testing the configuration 35
Other switches 36
Adding Nginx as a system service 37
System V scripts 37
About init scripts 39
Init script for older Debian-based distributions 39
Init script for SystemD-based distributions 40
Installing the script 40
Debian-based distributions 41
Red Hat-based distributions 41
Nginx Plus 42
Summary 43
Chapter 2: Basic Nginx Configuration
44
Configuration file syntax 44
Configuration directives 45
Organization and inclusions 47
Directive blocks 49
Advanced language rules 50
Directives accept specific syntaxes 50
Diminutives in directive values 51
Variables 52
String values 53
Base module directives 53
What are base modules? 53
Nginx process architecture 54
Core module directives 55
Events module 61
Configuration module 64
Necessary adjustments 64
Testing your server 65
Creating a test server 66
Performance tests 67
Httperf 68
Autobench 69
OpenWebLoad 71
Upgrading Nginx gracefully 72
Summary 73
Chapter 3: HTTP Configuration
74
[ ii ]
Table of Contents
HTTP core module 74
Structure blocks 75
Module directives 77
Socket and host configuration 77
listen 77
server_name 78
server_name_in_redirect 79
server_names_hash_max_size 80
server_names_hash_bucket_size 80
port_in_redirect 80
absolute_redirect 80
tcp_nodelay 81
tcp_nopush 81
sendfile 81
sendfile_max_chunk 82
send_lowat 82
reset_timedout_connection 82
Paths and documents 83
root 83
alias 83
error_page 84
if_modified_since 84
index 85
recursive_error_pages 85
try_files 86
Client requests 87
keepalive_requests 87
keepalive_timeout 87
keepalive_disable 88
send_timeout 88
client_body_in_file_only 88
client_body_in_single_buffer 89
client_body_buffer_size 89
client_body_temp_path 89
client_body_timeout 90
client_header_buffer_size 90
client_header_timeout 90
client_max_body_size 91
large_client_header_buffers 91
lingering_time 91
lingering_timeout 92
lingering_close 92
ignore_invalid_headers 92
chunked_transfer_encoding 93
max_ranges 93
MIME types 93
[ iii ]
