nginx

NGINX at its core is a reverse proxy server.

• high-performance web server
• can handle high-concurrency
• low resource usage
• faster static content delivery than Apache httpd

Installation on linux §

sudo apt install nginx -y

To check if its running: sudo systemctl status nginx

To run:: sudo systemctl start nginx

NGINX configuration file §

Everything in an nginx configuration file is either a Directive or a Context

Directives §

Directives are of 2 types

• Simple directives: it consists of the directive name and the space delimited parameters, like listen, return and others, and are terminated by semicolons
• Block directives: similar to simple directives, except that instead of ending with semicolons, they end with a pair of curly braces { } enclosing additional instructions

A Block Directive capable of containing other directives inside it is called a context. There are 4 core contexts in NGINX

1. events { } - this context is used for settings global configuration regarding how NGINX is going to handle requests on a general level. There can only be one events context in a valid configuration file
2. http { } - this is used for defining configuration regarding how the server is going to handle HTTP and HTTPS requests, specifically. There can be only one http context in a valid configuration file
3. server { } - this context is nested inside the http context and used for configuring specific virtual servers within a single host. There can be multiple server contexts in a valid configuration file nested inside the http context. Each server context is considered a virtual host
4. main { } - it is the configuration file itself, anything written outside of the 3 previously mentioned contexts is on the main context When a request reaches the nginx server, the listen directive is one of the ways to identify the correct server context to hit.