nginx Knowledge
Kip Landergren
(Updated: )
My nginx knowledge base that evolves as I learn more.
Contents
Overview
nginx is a rock-solid, performant, and lightweight web server written in C. It is built on on an event-driven architecture that helps maximize its ability to handle concurrent connections, and as such is often deployed as a reverse proxy.
Core Idea
Spawn worker processes that respond to OS events rather than blocking on I/O. In general: be as non-blocking as possible.
Key Concepts
- event-driven architecture
- non-blocking I/O
External Resources
- Inside NGINX: How We Designed for Performance & Scale
- The Architecture of Open Source Applications - nginx
Nginx Terminology
- block directive
- a configuration instruction that has the same structure of a simple directive but ends with braces (
{and}) that may contain other instructions - context
- a block directive that may contain other directives
- simple directive
- a configuration instruction consisting of a name and parameters separated by spaces, ending in a semicolon (
;)