Nginx is an event-driven webserver / reverse-proxy capable of handling many concurrent requests with relative ease.
This repo provides some boilerplate examples and recipe for getting started at configuring nginx for common use-cases, e.g. serving static files fast and efficient.
All recipe take best practice into account and try not to repeat mistakes outlined in IfIsEvil and CommonPitfalls.
It is recommended to always use the latest stable version of nginx. At the time of writing this is version 1.10.0.
Clone this repo into the nginx configuration folder, or download a release and extract it's contents to /etc/nginx.
By default, it is assumed log-files are written to /var/log/nginx, cache files will be written to /var/lib/nginx/ and the pid-file for the master process can be written to /run/.
The nginx.conf file provides a fallback server on port 80 which catches all requests that could not be matched to a configured server-name, e.g. someone typed in the IP address of the host machine nginx is running on, while almost all known mime-types are included in mime.types.
The following configuration directory structure offers maximum re-usability and flexibility:
/etc/nginx/
├── conf.d
├── recipe
├── sites-available
└── sites-enabled
-
conf.d
- Files ending with
*.confwill be loaded automatically and be global defaults.
- Files ending with
-
recipe
- Contains boilerplate for common use-cases that are neither server, nor location dependent.
-
sites-available
- Full server configurations, utilizing one or more recipe and filling in the gaps with explicit location rules.
-
sites-enabled
- Any file ending with
*.confwill be included in the nginx runtime configuration. Should only contain symlinks to configurations fromsites-available.
- Any file ending with
In order to enable and use server-configuration, type the following:
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled && ln -s ../static.example.com.conf && sudo nginx -s SIGHUP
This command will create a new symlink with the same name as the file in sites-available and reload nginx to apply the server configuration immediately.
Its always a good idea to test your configuration before reloading/restarting nginx. You'd be suprised how many people did a service reload nginx and not realizing that changes weren't in affect because the configuration files do not pass validation.
nginx -t will instruct nginx to check for syntax and/or logical errors in your configuration.
Some configuration options (http2 support, etc.) are only available in later versions of nginx, and/or require external libraries to be installed.
You can verify which nginx version you're currently using by typing nginx -v in a terminal. In case you're missing a module, nginx -V will show all configuration flags and compiled-in modules.
These recipe work for me and may not work for you. If you think you spotted an error or have suggestions for improvements just drop me a note.
Contributions are welcome!
Inspiration came from others having had similar ideas, most notably: