Fjordvald - Instant Nginx starter implement the nifty features of nginx with this focused guide

Martin Fjordvald is a 24-year-old Danish entrepreneur who started his company straight out of high school. Backed by a popular website, he became a jack of all trades having to deal with the business, programming, and marketing side of his business. As the popularity of his website grew, so did the performance requirements of his code and servers, which eventually led to his discovery of nginx in 2008.

Frustrated with the lack of documentation, Martin got involved with the community project to document nginx, and has since written several blog posts and Wiki articles detailing how nginx works. With the improved official documentation he now mostly blogs about advanced subjects and provides support in the nginx IRC channel on Freenode.

I'd like to first of all thank the nginx team for their wonderful piece of software, without which this book would never have happened. I owe all of my knowledge to the dedicated people of #nginx IRC channel for helping me to understand nginx so much better. I'd also like to thank Piotr Sikora, Jonathan Kolb, and Michael Lustfield, especially for their involvement and dedication to the community.

My thanks to Peter Schofield for helping me work through awkward sentences, improper grammar, and being a general sounding board when I was stuck on how to proceed. Furthermore, thanks goes to my family and parents for constantly asking me how the book was coming along, thus preventing me from procrastinating too much, and without their nagging this book would have taken far longer.

Jos Miguel Parrella started using Linux 12 years ago, and to make a living out of it in 2004 he signed his first government contract for Linux systems administration at the age of 17.

He focused on Debian, a project he joined as a maintainer, then a developer since 2007, for several packages including the nginx Web Server. He has helped government and private customers in several Latin American countries to deploy open source solutions with special attention on Perl-based solutions and clustering, including the Canaima Operating System, a Debian-based distribution used in 2.5M laptops in Venezuela.

For the past three years he has been on an assignment as an Open Source Strategist for a large multinational software company. Born in Venezuela, he is currently based in Washington.

I'd like to thank a businesswoman I admire, Ail, who is also my wife and partner, for her unconditional support in all my professional activities.

Michael Shadle is a self-proclaimed surgeon, when it comes to procedural PHP. He has been using PHP for over 10 years, along with MySQL and various Linux and BSD distributions. He has switched between many different web servers over the years, and considers nginx to be the best solution yet.

During the day, he works as a senior Web Developer at Intel Corporation on a handful of public-facing websites. He enjoys using his breadth of knowledge to come up with out of the box solutions to solve the variety of issues that come up. During the off-hours, he has a thriving personal consulting and web-development practice. He also has more personal project ideas than he can tackle at once.

He is a minimalist by heart, and believes that when architecting solutions, starting small and simple allows for a more agile approach in the long run. Michael also coined the phrase, "A simple stack is a happy stack."

You can visit his personal blog at http://michaelshadle.com/.

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Chapter 1. Instant Nginx Starter

Welcome to Instant Nginx Starter . With this book I aim to give you a solid start to your nginx adventure. You will learn the basic features of nginx and be guided through your first virtual host to a point where you will know how to build on top of the basics to get to advanced features.

This book contains the following sections:

So, what is nginx? teaches you what nginx actually is, how it can be used, and how it fares against similar technologies.

Installation helps us learn the procedure to download and install nginx with different methods, and the cons and pros of each.

Quick start covers nginx configuration syntax while creating our first virtual host through some simple steps. After this section you will be comfortable with the working of an nginx configuration.