Nginx, pronounced “Engine X,” is a high performance HTTP server and reverse proxy that is also able to proxy IMAP and POP3. Written by Igor Sysoev and licensed under a BSD variant, the official site is here.
While most of the official site and documentation is in Russian, an English language wiki is available. Nginx has a modular architecture and can serve static content extremely quickly using a high number of concurrent connections. It does accelerated reverse proxying without caching.
If a caching web accelerator is more what you’re looking for, you might look into Varnish, which we covered recently. (See Getting Glossy with Varnish.) Additional HTTP features include simple load balancing, fault tolerance, ACLs, flexible rewriting, FastCGI, and SSL.
Nginx also supports a variety of mail proxy features such as user redirection to IMAP/POP3 backends using an external HTTP authentication server, user authentication using an external HTTP authentication server, SSL, STARTTLS, and STLS. The mail proxy functionality is used in some very high volume implementations, including FastMail.FM and Zimbra.
Setting Up Nginx
Let’s get started with Nginx. After you download the latest tarball from the Nginx site, you can install nginx as follows:
$ ./configure --user=daemon --group=daemon && make # make install
You’ll need to adjust the configuration flags depending on the functionality you plan on utilizing. For instance, if you’d like to use regular expressions in your configuration file, you’ll need to point configure to the PCRE library….
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
