Sameer Parwani

I’ve been evaluating nginx, a lightweight web server, for the last week and I am coming away impressed. Over the last year or so nginx seems to have overtaken lighttpd for the crown of lightweight web servers.

In our case nginx is used to serve static files while apache is used to serve dynamic content (we also use nginx for simple load balancing). A request for http://www.mysite.com/file.extension will first be sent to nginx which will determine whether to serve the file itself (if its static) or if not it will request the url http://localhost:8080/file.extension from apache and pass back the result seamlessly to the end user.

#nginx configuration
server {
   listen       80;
   server_name www.mysite.com;

   # static files
   location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|txt|js|htm|html)$ {
      root /path/to/webroot;
   }

   # pass all else onto apache waiting at localhost:8080
   location / {
      proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
   }
}

Setting up Apache is also simple (but make sure to look through httpd.conf and comment out any line similar to “Listen 80″ because nginx and httpd will then both try listen on port 80):

#apache httpd configuration
Listen localhost:8080
<VirtualHost localhost:8080>
        DocumentRoot /path/to/webroot
</VirtualHost>

For clarity’s sake I would actually suggest giving your static files their own domain such as “static.mysite.com” so that you don’t need to run a regular expression to determine what files to serve directly from nginx. You would then proxy all requests to “www.mysite.com” to apache. However, the above set up will work out of the box without having to change your software.