Nginx Configurations Guide

  In this lesson, you will get to know the insides of Nginx Configuration. You will get acquainted with the Nginx configuration file syntax and directives, and how to organize the include the various configuration files. Next, you will learn about the base modules, which allow to define the basic parameters and configuration of Nginx. These are built-in into Nginx automatically during compile time. Finally, you will see how to configure an HTTP Server and a mail server proxy, as well as virtual hosts.

 Nginx Configurations in Linux

 All NGINX configuration files are located in the /etc/nginx/ directory. The primary configuration file is /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.

Lines preceded by a # character are comments and not interpreted by NGINX. Lines containing directives must end with a ; or NGINX will fail to load the configuration and report an error.

Below is a example of the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file that is included with installations from the NGINX repositories. The file starts with 5 directives: user, worker_processes, error_log, and pid. These are outside any specific block or context, so they’re said to exist in the main context. The events and http blocks are areas for additional directives, and they also exist in the main context.

user  nginx;
worker_processes  1;
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
       . . .
}
http {
       . . .
}

http block

The http block contains directives for handling web traffic. These directives are often referred to as universal because they are passed on to to all website configurations NGINX serves. See the NGINX docs for a list of available directives for the http block.

http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    #gzip  on;
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

Server Blocks

The http block above contains an include directive which tells NGINX where website configuration files are located.

If you installed from the official NGINX repository, this line will say include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; as it does in the http block above. Each website you host with NGINX should have its own configuration file in /etc/nginx/conf.d/, with the name formatted as example.com.conf. Sites which are disabled (not being served by NGINX) should be named example.com.conf.disabled.

If you installed NGINX from the Debian or Ubuntu repositories, this line will say include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;. The ../sites-enabled/ folder contains symlinks to the site configuration files stored in /etc/nginx/sites-available/. Sites in sites-available can be disabled by removing the symlink to sites-enabled.

Depending on your installation source, you’ll find an example configuration file at /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf or etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default.

Regardless of the installation source, server configuration files will contain a server block (or blocks) for a website. For example:

server {
    listen         80 default_server;
    listen         [::]:80 default_server;
    server_name    example.com www.example.com;
    root           /var/www/example.com;
    index          index.html;
    try_files $uri /index.html;
}

Location Blocks

The location setting lets you configure how NGINX will respond to requests for resources within the server. Just like the server_name directive tells NGINX how to process requests for the domain, location directives cover requests for specific files and folders, such as http://example.com/blog/. Here are some examples:

location / { }
location /images/ { }
location /blog/ { }
location /planet/ { }
location /planet/blog/ { }


The locations above are literal string matches, which match any part of an HTTP request that comes after the host segment:

Request: http://example.com/

Returns: Assuming that there is a server_name entry for example.com, the location / directive will determine what happens with this request.

NGINX always fulfills requests using the most specific match:

Request: http://example.com/planet/blog/ or http://example.com/planet/blog/about/

Returns: This is fulfilled by the location /planet/blog/ directive because it is more specific, even though location /planet/ also matches this request.

Location Root and Index

The location setting is another variable that has its own block of arguments.

Once NGINX has determined which location directive best matches a given request, the response to this request is determined by the contents of the associated location directive block. Here’s an example:

location / {
    root html;
    index index.html index.htm;
}


In this example, the document root is located in the html/ directory. Under the default installation prefix for NGINX, the full path to this location is /etc/nginx/html/.

Request: http://example.com/blog/includes/style.css

Returns: NGINX will attempt to serve the file located at /etc/nginx/html/blog/includes/style.css

The index variable tells NGINX which file to serve if none is specified. For example:

Request: http://example.com

Returns: NGINX will attempt to serve the file located at /etc/nginx/html/index.html.

If multiple files are specified for the index directive, NGINX will process the list in order and fulfill the request with the first file that exists. If index.html doesn’t exist in the relevant directory, then index.htm will be used. If neither exists, a 404 message will be sent.

location / {
    root   /srv/www/example.com/public_html;
    index  index.html index.htm;
}



To Connect with backendserver,

location / {
 proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 proxy_pass http://example.com/;
}


In this example, proxy_pass forwards the request to backend server http://example.com/.

Nginx configurations Video

To see Nginx configurations ,  see below video,