Learn Nginx

Nginx is a web server written is C.

Install

OSX

You can install it via Homebrew or source.

$ brew update
$ brew install nginx

To install openresty (for lua and other packages) using homebrew:

$ brew update
$ brew install homebrew/nginx/openresty

For source installation check the get started guide and also

$ cd source/1.10.3/
$ ./configure
$

Linux

You can install nginx using apt-get

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx

Commands

Ask help

$ nginx -h

In order to run it independently regardless of the default configs which depends on the absolute path of nginx installation, you can use:

nginx -p "$(pwd)" -c configs/simple.conf

Configs

The bare minimum config possible is:

# Sets the maximum number of simultaneous connections
# by our experiments the minimum seems 3.
events {
  worker_connections 3;
}

# This is the bare minimum to run the server
# it will connect to port 8000 with no static
# files to server for any path.
# On Linux it will connect to port 80 instead.
http {
  server {
    # root ./html;
    # listen 8000;
  }
}

Proxy

In order to create a reverse proxy the minimum configuration is:

events {
  worker_connections 10;
}

http {
  server {
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3001$1;
    }
  }
}

Locations

location /assets/ {
  root ./; # assets is appended to root
}
location /assets/ {
  alias assets/; # literal directory path
}

Using alias: With a request of /i/top.gif, the file /data/w3/images/top.gif will be sent. Using root: With a request of /i/top.gif, the file /data/w3/i/top.gif will be sent.

### Logs

There are two main log types: access_log and error_log

Access log Syntax: $remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" "$http_user_agent"

Error log

npm scripts

SERVER=proxy npm run restart

Resources

• Official wiki:
• Wiki on GitHub:
• Official doc on logs:
• Log parsing:
• Official debug log
• Nginx config tutorial
• Realtime metrics + log monitoring