Nginx Configuration

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.confuser 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:

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