Basic nginx Configuration
| Basic nginx Configuration |
| Server - Web Server |
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Enjoying This Tutorial? Check out our Online Linux Courses! The configuration is organized in to various sections, such as event, http, and server. "event" defines global settings such as event models and some connection handeling. The "http" section defines variables concering the HTTP protocol itself, such as keepalive timeouts. "server" is where you define individual sites to be cached, proxied, and served. There is also a "main" section, which has no definition block. The exact location and structure of your nginx configuration depends on your distribtion of Linux or BSD, but it is most likely under /etc/nginx or /usr/local/etc/nginx. Some distributions like to seperate out the "server" blocks in to individual files in their default setups. While not required, it certainly makes adding and removing sites a lot easier, and it makes it easier to automate. We'll start with the "main" section. A typical section looks like this:
user www-data; worker_processes 4; pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
"user" defines the user that the server runs as, "worker_processes" defines how many nginx instances actually run, and "pid" refers to where it stores the process ID of the master process. Fairly standard stuff for any daemon. It is of course important to ensure the nginx process can read the files to be served, so pay close attention to file ownership. "worker_processes" should be initially set to the number of CPU cores available. The first section is "events". The settings here define how the daemon handles incoming requests at the system level.
events { #worker_connections 4096; #this is a lot worker_connections 1024; #this is not a lot multi_accept on; use epoll; #linux, kqueue for bsd }
The next section is "http". This is where most of your tuning will take place. It also contains all "server" directives, which, in the example configuration shown are included from a directory.
http { sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay on; keepalive_timeout 65; types_hash_max_size 2048; gzip on; include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; }
There are many more options than what we have defined in this example, but the ones shown are of the highest priority, and the defaults often just won't do what you want.
The rest of the parameters are either self explanitory (such as access_log), or situational depending on your particular setup (such as the includes & default_type). It is important to note that the following "server" section is a part of the "http" section! Here is an example "server" section that is set up to serve out HTML and other static files. PHP and other server-side scripting support is beyond the scope of this introductory article. Remember, this is nested within the "http" section! You can have as many of these sections as you'd like, and most settings from the "http" section can be overridden here on a per-server basis. This is analogous to Apache's Virtual Host mechanisms. server { listen 80 default_server; listen 443 default_server ssl; server_name beginlinux.com; #ssl on; ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/startcom/ssl-unified.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/startcom/startcom.key; #access_log /var/log/nginx/website.access_log; #error_log /var/log/nginx/website.error_log; root /var/www/beginlinux.com; index index.html; location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ { expires max; log_not_found off; } } Out of all of this, the most important lines are the "listen", "root", and "index" directives. With those three you can have a fully functional site.
With the above you are ready to host a static website. nginx does not require you to restart the server to pick up on configuration changes. The safe way to do this is: nginx -s reload This will test the configuration for sanity, then reload the configuration and start using it. It takes place immediately. For more information about nginx, refer to its wiki. http://wiki.nginx.org Written by Michael Griffith |
nginx is a powerful and modern HTTP server. It is perhaps most commonly used as a reverse proxy, also known as a load balancer or front end proxy. It follows the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing, and doing it well, and as such, it relies on several helper daemons to become a full-featured web server such as Apache. For example, to serve PHP, it relies on php-fpm to do the processing, while nginx itself handles the caching and speaking the HTTP protocol itself. In this article, we will talk about common configuration options, and how they relate to it's performance. We'll also discuss some basic administrative tasks.
