Mastering Nginx

by Dimitri Aivaliotis

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. 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.

Genres: Technology, Technical, Programming, Web

322 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2012

Reviews

[Максим Сёмочкин · Rating 3 out of 5]

Какая-то невнятная смесь из мануала и простого перечисления директив конфигурационного файла.

[Sorin Manole · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty solid gathering of widely used nginx modules with their descriptions.

As one would probably guess, this is NOT a comprehensive documentation of nginx. While quite a few times I had to read some sentences for a few times, and after that open up the official nginx documentation because some things were glanced over, I can say I was mostly satisfied by the content. The commented configuration examples were welcome and the few guides like "Converting Apache rewrite rules to nginx" were also a nice touch. There was even an example of a debug log with commentaries. This unfortunately was (I think) the only place where nginx phases were mentioned.

Most of what's in the book can be found online, and more of what's not in the book, but not nearly as structured. After reading it is easy for me to dive deeper in what I need. Although before using any of the modules/directives I will read the corresponding official documentation, this book did provide an introduction and overview of what it would take to configure an nginx server and what are the current best practices for doing that.

[Yee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty straightforward book to learn Nginx. My knowledge of Nginx is zero before reading this book but this book has increases my knowledge and understanding about Nginx because it is easy to read and very detailed. It provides various types of scripts, examples and scenarios with the descriptive explanations as well. I will keep this book for my future reference in case I need it.

[Artur Sabirov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Книга на треть состоит из перечня директив и их описания, но есть и несколько полезных use-case'ов. Например, как настраивать SSL, балансировку, роутить запросы, кэшировать бекенды и использовать модули.

[Philippe Costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent level of information on Nginx and the most used modules with their descriptions. I'd recommend that you keep right beside you desk, just in case.