nginx [engine x] is a high quality, light footprint (much ligher than Apache HTTPD), high performance HTTP server and mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev. nginx is distributed under BSD license unlike its competitor Lighttpd. We are progressively transferring our sites over to nginx. Today when I had to restart the server, I realized (after few hours) with horror that we had forgot to add the script to start nginx automatically after reboot. When you want any command to execute everytime after a reboot you should add it to /etc/rc.local. The commands in rc.local are executed *after* all the other init scripts. To automatically start nginx as well as fastcgi on reboot you should add the following lines to /etc/rc.local at the end -

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Nginx is a high performance web server and mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev and a good replacement for Apache HTTPD, the market leader. Nginx is rapidly increasing its market share with major websites joining it like wordpress.com. In the June 2008 Netcraft survey LiteSpeed lost more than 600 thousand sites during this survey, while nginx gained more than a million sites; more than doubling in numbers. The WordPress blogging system recently converted all of its load balancers to nginx, using the upstream hash module to serve 8-9 thousand requests per second. We too have decided to move some of our websites to Nginx. Here are few essential tips and general guidelines for configuring Nginx. This is not a substitute for reading the documentation (rtfm). However when you are stuck even after reading and re-reading the nginx documentation then read below. You will understand the value of the tips below only then

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We now have our phpBB forum running on Nginx web server, a high quality and significantly better performing web server than Apache HTTPD. Soem of the challenges we faced were:

1. We use nice permalinks in the forum so there are lots of apache httpd rewrite rules in .htaccess files which had to be converted to nginx format.
2. Additionally we also had to configure it for a virtual hosting setup where the same IP address (server) is shared by multiple websites.

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Any PHP based software like WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, MODx etc. will serve pages both from http://your-site.com as well as http://your-site.com/index.php. This creates duplicate content for search engines, which may then decide to penalize your site for duplicate content. You can safely prevent duplicate content with the following apache code / directive added to your .htaccess file (or in httpd.conf):

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Apache HTTPD servers are configured by default to display directory listing, when index files like index.htm or index.html of index.php etc. are not present in the directory. This can expose sensitive information to prying eyes and are often indexed by search engines. This can compromise your data by making it visible to unintended audience. The solution is simple. You can add a line to your .htaccess file (create the file if not present) to prevent directory listing for that directory and its sub-directories:
IndexIgnore *

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