Nginx Configuration

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When to Use
• Quick Start
• Reference Guides
• Best Practices

Overview

Master Nginx configuration for production-grade web servers, reverse proxies, load balancing, SSL termination, caching, and API gateway patterns with advanced performance tuning.

When to Use

• Reverse proxy setup
• Load balancing between backend services
• SSL/TLS termination
• HTTP/2 and gRPC support
• Caching and compression
• Rate limiting and DDoS protection
• URL rewriting and routing
• API gateway functionality

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
user nginx;
worker_processes auto;
worker_rlimit_nofile 65535;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 4096;
    use epoll;
    multi_accept on;
}

http {
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;

    # Logging
    log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                    '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    log_format upstream_time '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] '
                            '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent '
                            '"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" '
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
Production Nginx Configuration	Production Nginx Configuration
HTTPS Server with Load Balancing	HTTPS Server with Load Balancing
Nginx Configuration Script	Nginx Configuration Script
Nginx Monitoring Configuration	Nginx Monitoring Configuration

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Use HTTP/2 for performance
• Enable SSL/TLS with strong ciphers
• Implement proper caching strategies
• Use upstream connection pooling
• Monitor with stub_status or prometheus
• Rate limit to prevent abuse
• Add security headers
• Use least_conn load balancing
• Keep error logs separate from access logs

❌ DON'T

• Disable gzip compression
• Use weak SSL ciphers
• Cache authenticated responses
• Allow direct access to backends
• Ignore upstream health checks
• Mix HTTP and HTTPS without redirect
• Use default error pages in production
• Cache sensitive user data