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Notes

Nginx

Nginx is an open source web server, that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, http cache etc.

What are some usecases to use nginx?

  • Static content server
  • Reverse proxy
  • SSL
  • Cache
  • Websocket proxy
  • API Gateway
  • Load balancer

nginx is used for lots of things as shown above. We will implement some of the usecases.

Installation

Terminal window
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

Above should have installed the nginx on your system.

Let’s check.

Terminal window
sudo nginx -v
sudo nginx

This should start an nginx server on port 80, try visiting thw website on the browser.

nginx.conf

Let’s open the nginx.conf file and see how it looks like.

Terminal window
sudo vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

The nginx config file will be like like following:

user  nginx;
worker_processes  auto;


error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log notice;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;




events {
  worker_connections  1024;
}


# We will create server blocks inside http
http {
  include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
  default_type  application/octet-stream;


  log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                    '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';


  access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;


  sendfile        on;
  #tcp_nopush     on;


  keepalive_timeout  65;


  #gzip  on;


  include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

We will be making changes for creating server inside of the http block in next.