nginx-mastery

Complete nginx engineering skill — all directives, modules, patterns, and operational commands from the official nginx.org documentation (2026).

Born from direct study of every nginx.org module page. Not a blog post, not Stack Overflow scraps — official source material, organized for practitioners.

What's Inside

Section	Coverage
Core Architecture	Process model, worker tuning, thread pools, PCRE JIT, dynamic modules
HTTP Core	Server/location selection, 30+ directives, location matching priority, embedded variables
Proxy	proxy_pass URI rules, buffering, timeouts, SSL upstream, failover
Upstream	6 load balancing methods, server params, keepalive, health checks
SSL/HTTPS	Multi-cert (RSA+ECDSA), TLS 1.3, OCSP stapling, session cache, error codes
Compression	Gzip configuration with all directives
Rate Limiting	Leaky bucket, burst/nodelay, dry-run mode, per-API-key patterns
Rewrite	Flags (last/break/redirect/permanent), if conditions, return codes
Access Control	allow/deny, geo module patterns
HTTP/2 & HTTP/3	HTTP/2 directives, HTTP/3 QUIC config, reuseport, eBPF
Stream (TCP/UDP)	Upstream, proxy_pass, UDP DNS, PROXY protocol
Caching	proxy_cache_path, cache keys, bypass/no_cache, purge patterns
Logging	Custom formats, JSON error logs, monitoring variables
Operational Commands	nginx -t/-T/-V/-s, process management, debugging
Common Patterns	Reverse proxy, static+proxy, load balancer, rate limit by API key, SSL+HSTS
Troubleshooting	502/504/413, cache issues, SSL problems, high CPU/memory
Directive Context Reference	Quick lookup table for all contexts
Version Matrix	11+ features with exact nginx version numbers

How to Use

This is a Hermes Agent skill. Load it in any Hermes session:

skill_view(name='nginx-mastery')

Or read the SKILL.md file directly — it's self-contained markdown, no special tooling required.

Structure

nginx-mastery/
├── README.md        # This file
└── SKILL.md         # The complete nginx reference (copy this anywhere)

Source

Every directive, default value, and context in this skill was verified against the official nginx.org documentation:

• https://nginx.org/en/docs/
• Modules: ngx_core_module, ngx_http_core_module, ngx_http_proxy_module, ngx_http_upstream_module, ngx_http_ssl_module, ngx_http_gzip_module, ngx_http_limit_req_module, ngx_http_rewrite_module, ngx_http_access_module, ngx_http_v2_module, ngx_http_v3_module, ngx_stream_core_module

Version Notes

Last updated: July 2026. Covers nginx features up to:

• http2 directive (1.25.1)
• HTTP/3 / QUIC (1.25.0)
• reuseport (1.9.1+)
• ssl_certificate_cache (1.27.4)
• JSON error_log (1.29.8, commercial)
• quic_bpf eBPF (1.25.0)

License

MIT