Nginx HTTP Server

319 Pages·2013·3.85 MB·English

by  Clément Nedelcu

Nginx HTTP Server
Second Edition
Make the most of your infrastructure and serve pages
faster than ever with Nginx
Clément Nedelcu
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Nginx HTTP Server
Second Edition
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing
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First published: July 2010
Second edition: July 2013
Production Reference: 1120713
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78216-232-2
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Cover Image by Suresh Mogre ([email protected])
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Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Clément Nedelcu Rahul Dixit
Reviewers Proofreader
Michael Shadle Joel T. Johnson
Alex Kapranoff
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Acquisition Editor
Usha Iyer
Graphics
Valentina D'Silva
Lead Technical Editor
Azharuddin Sheikh Disha Haria
Technical Editors Production Coordinator
Vrinda Nitesh Bhosale Prachali Bhiwandkar
Athira Laji
Dominic Pereira Cover Work
Prachali Bhiwandkar
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About the Author
Clément Nedelcu was born in France and studied in UK, French, and Chinese
universities. After teaching computer science and programming in several eastern
Chinese universities, he worked as a Technology Consultant in France, specializing
in web and Microsoft .NET programming as well as Linux server administration.
Since 2005, he has also been administering a major network of websites in his spare
time. This eventually led him to discover Nginx: it made such a difference that he
started his own blog about it. One thing leading to another…
I would like to express my gratitude to my wife Julie, my son Leo
who was born during the writing of this book and never ceased
to cheer me up; my family and my friends who have all been very
supportive all along the writing stage. This book is dedicated to
Martin Fjordvald for originally directing me to Nginx when my
servers were about to kick the bucket. Special thanks to Cliff Wells,
Maxim Dounin, and all the folks on the #nginx IRC channel on
Freenode.
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About the Reviewers
Michael Shadle is a self-proclaimed surgeon, when it comes to procedural PHP.
He has been using PHP for over ten years along with MySQL and various Linux
and BSD distributions. He has switched between many different web servers over
the years and considers Nginx to be the best solution yet.
During the day he works as a senior Web Developer at Intel Corporation on a
handful of public-facing websites. He enjoys using his breadth of knowledge to
come up with "out of the box" solutions to solve the variety of issues that come
up. During the off-hours, he has a thriving personal consulting, web development
practice, and has many more personal project ideas than he can tackle at once.
He is a minimalist by heart, and believes that when architecting solutions, starting
small and simple allows for a more agile approach in the long run. Michael also
coined the phrase, "A simple stack is a happy stack."

Alex Kapranoff was born in a family of an electronics engineer and a programmer
for old Soviet "Big Iron" computers. He started to write programs at the age of 12 and
has never worked outside of the IT industry since then. After getting his Software
Engineering degree with honors he had a short stint in the world of enterprise
databases and Windows. Then he settled on open-source Unix-like environments
for good, first FreeBSD and then Linux, working as a developer for many Russian
companies from ISPs to search engines. Most of his experience has been with e-mail/
messaging systems and web security. Right now he is trying his hand at a product and
project management position in Yandex, one of the biggest search engines in the world.
He took his first look at Nginx working in Rambler side-by-side with Nginx's author
Igor Sysoev before the initial public release of the product. Since then, Nginx has
been an essential tool in his kit. He won't launch a website, no matter how complex
it is, without using Nginx nowadays.
He strongly believes in the Free Software Movement, loves Perl, plain C, LISP, cooking,
and fishing, and lives with a beautiful girlfriend and an old cat in Moscow, Russia.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Downloading and Installing Nginx 7
Setting up the prerequisites 7
GCC – GNU Compiler Collection 8
The PCRE library 9
The zlib library 10
OpenSSL 11
Downloading Nginx 11
Websites and resources 11
Version branches 13
Features 14
Downloading and extracting 15
Configure options 15
The easy way 16
Path options 16
Prerequisites options 18
Module options 20
Modules enabled by default 20
Modules disabled by default 21
Miscellaneous options 22
Configuration examples 24
About the prefix switch 24
Regular HTTP and HTTPS servers 25
All modules enabled 25
Mail server proxy 26
Build configuration issues 26
Make sure you installed the prerequisites 26
Directories exist and are writable 27
Compiling and installing 27
Table of Contents
Controlling the Nginx service 28
Daemons and services 28
User and group 28
Nginx command-line switches 29
Starting and stopping the daemon 29
Testing the configuration 30
Other switches 31
Adding Nginx as a system service 31
System V scripts 32
What is an init script? 33
Init script for Debian-based distributions 33
Init script for Red Hat-based distributions 34
Installing the script 34
Debian-based distributions 35
Red Hat-based distributions 35
Summary 36
Chapter 2: Basic Nginx Configuration 37
Configuration file syntax 37
Configuration Directives 38
Organization and inclusions 39
Directive blocks 41
Advanced language rules 42
Directives accept specific syntaxes 42
Diminutives in directive values 43
Variables 44
String values 44
Base module directives 44
What are base modules? 45
Nginx process architecture 45
Core module directives 46
Events module 51
Configuration module 54
A configuration for your profile 54
Understanding the default configuration 54
Necessary adjustments 55
Adapting to your hardware 56
Testing your server 57
Creating a test server 58
Performance tests 59
Httperf 59
Autobench 61
OpenWebLoad 62
[ ii ]
Table of Contents
Upgrading Nginx gracefully 64
Summary 64
Chapter 3: HTTP Configuration 65
HTTP Core module 65
Structure blocks 66
Module directives 67
Socket and host configuration 68
listen 68
server_name 68
server_name_in_redirect 69
server_names_hash_max_size 70
server_names_hash_bucket_size 70
port_in_redirect 70
tcp_nodelay 70
tcp_nopush 71
sendfile 71
sendfile_max_chunk 71
send_lowat 72
reset_timedout_connection 72
Paths and documents 72
root 72
alias 73
error_page 73
if_modified_since 74
index 74
recursive_error_pages 75
try_files 75
Client requests 75
keepalive_requests 76
keepalive_timeout 76
keepalive_disable 76
send_timeout 76
client_body_in_file_only 77
client_body_in_single_buffer 77
client_body_buffer_size 77
client_body_temp_path 78
client_body_timeout 78
client_header_buffer_size 78
client_header_timeout 79
client_max_body_size 79
large_client_header_buffers 79
lingering_time 80
lingering_timeout 80
lingering_close 80
ignore_invalid_headers 80
chunked_transfer_encoding 81
max_ranges 81
[ iii ]