Dimitri Aivaliotis - Mastering Nginx

Dimitri Aivaliotis works as a Systems Architect at a hosting provider in Zurich, Switzerland. His career has taken him from building a Linux-based computer network for a school up through dual-datacenter high-availability infrastructures for banks and online portals. He has spent over a decade solving his customers problems and discovered NGINX along the way. He uses the software daily to provide web serving, proxying, and media-streaming services to his customers.

Dimitri graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and received an MS in Management Information Systems at Florida State University.

This is his first book.

I would like to thank John Blackwell and Phil Margolis for reading early drafts of the manuscript. Their criticism and tips have helped me greatly and made this a better book. I would also like to thank the technical reviewers for providing constructive feedback and pointing out errors I have made along the way. Any remaining errors are of course my own.

The team at Packt Publishing has been really supportive in getting this project off the ground.Their faith in me as a writer has bolstered me during the dark times of missed deadlines.

The knowledge and support of the NGINX, Inc. team has been instrumental in filling in the gaps in my understanding of how NGINX works. I could not have written this book without them.

An especially heartfelt thanks goes out to my family. My wife and children have had to cope with my many writing sessions. Their patience during this time is greatly appreciated.

Yasir Adnan lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is a computer science student. He also works as a freelance programmer. He has worked on both mobile and web applications. Nowadays he mainly develops mobile applications. He can be reached at <>.

Andrew Alexeev is a co-founder of NGINX, Inc.the high performance web company behind the NGINX web server. Prior to joining NGINX, Inc. at the beginning of 2011, Andrew worked in the Internet industry and in a variety of ICT divisions for enterprises. Andrew holds a diploma in Electronics from St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University and an executive MBA from Antwerp Management School.

Antonio P.P. Almeida (@perusio) has been obsessed with NGINX and high-performance web stacks ever since he was trying to develop for Drupal on a battered 1.3 GHz Centrino-based laptop and Apaches resource appetite made NGINX inevitable. He has been learning how to get the most out of NGINX in all possible kinds of applications, in particular all the subtleties of NGINX configuration language. He lives and works in Paris. Besides NGINX, his other main obsessions are obscure late Italian medieval music, cinema, and how to make Drupal more awesome.

Rainer Duffner received a degree in Information Systems from the University of Applied Science in Konstanz, Germany, and currently works as a Systems Engineer at EveryWare AG, where he helps customers get the most out of their managed dedicated FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris servers. He lives in a small town next to Zurich, Switzerland, and enjoys spending his free time on a mountain bike around Zurich and the Swiss mountains.

Id like to thank Dimitri for the opportunity to help review this fine book. Its a useful resource all along.

NGINX is a high-performance web server designed to use very few system resources. There are many how-to's and example configurations floating around on the Web. This guide will serve to clarify the murky waters of NGINX configuration. In doing so you will learn how to tune NGINX for various situations, what some of the more obscure configuration options do, and how to design a decent configuration to match your needs.

You will no longer feel the need to copy-paste a configuration snippet because you will understand how to construct a configuration file to do exactly what you want it to do. This is a process, and there will be bumps along the way, but with the tips explained in this book you will feel comfortable writing an NGINX configuration file by hand. In case something doesn't work as expected, you will be able to debug the problem yourself or at least be capable of asking for help without feeling like you haven't given it a try yourself.