Chapter 1. Installing NGINX and Third-Party Modules
NGINX was first conceived to be an HTTP server. It was created to solve the C10K problem, described by Daniel Kegel on http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html, in designing a web server to handle 10,000 simultaneous connections. NGINX can do this through its event-based connection-handling mechanism and will use the OS-appropriate event mechanism in order to achieve this goal.
Before we begin exploring how to configure NGINX, we will first install it. This chapter details how to install NGINX and how to get the correct modules installed and configured. NGINX is modular by design and there is a rich community of third-party module developers who have added functionality to the core NGINX server by creating modules that can be compiled into the server and installed along with it.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Installing NGINX using a package manager
- Installing NGINX from source
- Configuring for a web or mail service
- Configuring SSL support
- Enabling various modules
- Finding and installing third-party modules
- Adding support for Lua
- Putting it all together
