Nginx Hacking Tips

Nginx LogoNginx 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 :)

Full article (1050 words) »

Tips on Configuring Nginx for Virtual Hosting

Nginx tutorials and examples doesn't tell you how you can configure nginx with virtual hosting when different sites are in different pre-defined directories. Often you are moving over your site from a different web server like Apache HTTPD to Nginx. So you have a pre-defined directory structure which may not be easy to change. Configuring nginx is somewhat tricky in this scenario because nginx isn't very flexible in accepting directives everywhere. After much experimentation we came up with this simple way: Full article (242 words) »

How To Run phpBB on Nginx With Virtual Hosting

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.

Full article (434 words) »
Protected by Comment Guard Pro