Nginx Study Notes

Connection and Buffer Tuning

How worker, connection, and buffer settings determine Nginx's throughput ceiling, and how to tune them safely for high-concurrency workloads.

Deploying a Web App Behind Nginx

A practical walkthrough of putting Nginx in front of an application server: reverse proxying, TLS termination, static asset serving, and process management.

Gzip and Compression

How Nginx's gzip module shrinks response payloads, the directives that control it, and how Brotli compares as a modern alternative.

Installing and Running Nginx

How to install Nginx via package managers or Docker, and how to manage the running service safely.

Load Balancing Algorithms

Understand nginx's round robin, weighted round robin, least_conn, and ip_hash load-balancing algorithms and when to use each.

Locations and Matching Rules

How Nginx's location block matching algorithm actually works — prefix, exact, and regex modifiers, and the precedence order that trips up most misconfiguration…

Logging in Nginx

How access logs and error logs work in Nginx, the difference between request_time and upstream_response_time for diagnosing latency, and how to control log vol…

Mitigating DDoS with Nginx

Use Nginx's rate limiting, connection limiting, and buffering controls as a first line of defense against volumetric and application-layer DDoS attacks.

Nginx and Let's Encrypt

Automate free, trusted TLS certificates for Nginx using Let's Encrypt and Certbot, including auto-renewal and HTTPS redirection.

Nginx Architecture and Worker Processes

How Nginx's master-worker process model and event-driven design deliver high concurrency with a small memory footprint.

Nginx as an API Gateway

How to use Nginx to route, rate-limit, authenticate, and load balance API traffic across backend services without a dedicated gateway product.

Nginx Caching Explained

How Nginx's proxy_cache module stores upstream responses to cut backend load and speed up delivery, and how to configure, key, and invalidate that cache correc…

Nginx Hardening Checklist

A practical, prioritized checklist for locking down a production Nginx deployment, from TLS configuration to information disclosure and module minimization.

Nginx Interview Questions

A curated set of Nginx interview questions covering architecture, configuration, reverse proxying, performance, and troubleshooting, with model answers.

Nginx Performance Benchmarking

How to rigorously measure Nginx throughput and latency with tools like ab and wrk, interpret latency percentiles, and avoid common benchmarking pitfalls.

Nginx Quick Reference

A condensed reference of essential Nginx commands, directives, and configuration patterns for daily operational use.

Nginx Security Headers

Learn how to configure HTTP response headers in Nginx to protect users from clickjacking, MIME-sniffing, XSS, and insecure transport.

Nginx Variables

How Nginx's dollar-sign variables are lazily computed per request, the difference between commonly confused ones like $uri and $request_uri, and how map builds…

Nginx vs Apache

A practical comparison of Nginx's event-driven architecture against Apache's process-based model, covering configuration philosophy, performance under load, an…

Proxying WebSockets with Nginx

Configure nginx to correctly upgrade and proxy long-lived WebSocket connections, including timeouts and load-balancing considerations.

Rate Limiting in Nginx

How Nginx's limit_req and limit_conn modules throttle abusive or excessive traffic using a leaky bucket algorithm, burst allowances, and connection caps.

Restricting Access with Nginx

Control who can reach specific routes and resources using Nginx's IP allow/deny rules, HTTP basic auth, and satisfy directives.

Reverse Proxy Basics

Learn what a reverse proxy does, how nginx's proxy_pass directive rewrites request paths, and how to preserve client context with forwarded headers.

Rewrites and Redirects

The difference between client-visible redirects (return) and internal URI rewrites (rewrite) in Nginx, plus the flags and pitfalls that cause loops and lost qu…