HOWTO: Configure nginx for Debian / Ubuntu
UPDATE: I’m reworking my config blending in the security ideas found on camomel.org they’re really thought things through on this, this should make for a very secure environment.
I’m always trying new software, and with the webserver I’ve moved from Apache 1.3 to 2.0 to 2.2, and then later I moved everything over to Lighttpd, which I’ve liked, save for some memory issues that popped up. Now, enter a web server named nginx (engine x), written by a Russian hacker. It’s already proved it’s meddle by running some of the largest Russian sites for years now. It has the speed of Lighttpd, but with none of that memory weirdness, plus it uses a fraction of the CPU, so scaling should be smooth for highly visited sites. It also does cool things like load balancing, reverse proxy, IMAP and POP proxy, etc, so I can see it being used in a variety of ways on a network. It took me some time to understand how to configure it, which was a case of me just making it harder than it really is, so I wanted to post it here. Look for updates as we go along, but this is currently backing a Production site I manage.
user www-data www-data; worker_processes 5; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr $host $remote_user [$time_local] “$request” ‘ ‘$status $body_bytes_sent “$http_referer” “$http_user_agent” ‘ ‘”$request_time” “$gzip_ratio”‘; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay off; keepalive_timeout 65; gzip on; gzip_http_version 1.1; gzip_vary on; gzip_comp_level 6; gzip_buffers 16 8k; #gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth; gzip_proxied any; gzip_min_length 1000; gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript; server { listen 80; client_max_body_size 50M; server_name server.domain.com; root /var/www; index index.html index.php; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html; location = /500.html { root /var/www; } location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif)$ { root /var/www; expires 30d; } location ~ \.php$ { include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; } } }




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