Description
2006 was an exciting year. The disappointment that surrounded the dot-com crash had pretty much been superseded by a renewed and more confident growth of Web 2.0 and inspired a search for technologies of a new age.
At that time, I was looking for a web server to power my projects that would do many things in a different way. After getting some experience in large-scale online projects, I knew that the popular LAMP stack was suboptimal and sometimes did not solve certain challenges, such as efficient uploads, geo-dependent rate limiting, and so on.
After trying and rejecting a number of options, I came to know about Nginx and immediately felt that my search was over. It is small yet powerful, with a clean code base, good extensibility, relevant set of features, and a number of architectural challenges solved. Nginx definitely stood out from the crowd!
I immediately got inspired and felt some affinity to this project. I tried participating in the Nginx community, learned, shared my knowledge, and contributed as much as I could.
With time, my knowledge of Nginx grew. I started to get consultancy requests and have been capable of addressing quite sophisticated cases. After some time, I realized that some of my knowledge might be worth sharing with everyone. That’s how I started a blog at www.nginxguts.com.
A blog turned out to be an author-driven medium. A more reader-focused and more thorough medium was in demand, so I set aside some time to assemble my knowledge in the more solid form of a book. That’s how the book you’re holding in your hands right now came into existence.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Nginx, gives you the most basic knowledge about Nginx, including how to carry out the very basic installation and get Nginx up and running quickly. A detailed explanation of the structure of the configuration file is given so that you know where exactly code snippets from the rest of the book apply.
Chapter 2, Managing Nginx, explains how to manage an operating Nginx instance(s).
Chapter 3, Proxying and Caching, explains how to turn Nginx into a powerful web proxy and cache.
Chapter 4, Rewrite Engine and Access Control, explains how to use the rewrite engine to manipulate URLs and secure your web resources.
Chapter 5, Managing Inbound and Outbound Traffic, describes how to apply various restrictions to inbound traffic, and how to use and manage upstream.
Chapter 6, Performance Tuning, explains how to squeeze the most out of your Nginx server.