NGINX Awesomeness: A Simple, Powerful Web Server and More

A 2MB exe which runs a web server to rival Apache? Well, maybe not, but if you Like Simple™ then you will Like NGINX. In terms of power it kicks Mongoose's ass I have to say because that critter, whom I am fond  of, was pretty limited. So, ff you want to run multiple sites, reverse proxy, finely control everything HTTP and more then NGINX is your new best friend

Download and run and you have a webserver on http://localhost serving up whatever is in your HTML folder. I've stripped down the conf/nginx.conf file in order to learn and explain it here:

http {
    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;
        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }
    }
}
events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

This obviously sets up an HTTP server on your machine listening on port 80. It's actually just the explicit version of the default settings and so equivalent to:

http {
    server {}
}
events {}

If you like being Spartan!

Next: want a second server (host name)? Just add a new server section:

server {
    server_name  mydomain.com;
    location / {
        root   /somewhere/else/;
        autoindex on;
    }
}

The autoindex setting provides an automatic directory listing (great for local test servers).

Of course you can configure logging (even per server), HTTP settings (e.g. keep alive stuff), mime types, SSL, hostname wildcards, virtual directories, error pages, gzip (nice), deny access (for .htaccess you need a converter) and all the usual stuff you need. But what get's me excited is the reverse proxy stuff.

Our company uses an expensive, high tech appliance for reverse proxy (and load balancing) functionality. This helps keep our web servers out of the DMZ and provides a neat front so that we can have multiple different web servers behind one application on one domain. The downside is you need a degree in it to configure it. NGINX is Simple™ - remember! Watch this:

Let's say you have another web server running PHP and you want NGINX to reverse proxy it. Simply pass all URLs ending in .php to that server with the location command's RegEx functionality:

location ~ \.php$ {
    proxy_pass   http://myphp.mydomain.com:8080;
}

That's awesome IMO. You need some serious expertise and clicking to get that done in our enterpise level applicance whose name begin's with "F" and ends with "5" but shall otherwise remain unnamed.

So sharpen up your RegEx skills and run your whole organisation's web infrastructure through one domain if you like.