Why I use Nginx

There are two very important reasons why I use Nginx to run my website:

1. It was the first thing I used
2. It has smaller config files than Apache

Even though I have been using it for quite some time, I didn’t really understand it - until I setup a second static hosting domain to host a Jenkins theme, which made me realise it’s not too bad.

The css would only be applied if the http headers were correct (ie it had text/css rather than just text/plain). Files servered though GitLab’s ‘raw’ mode have a text/plain header.

So this is my nginx config file, in sections.

http {
  include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
  passenger_root # Path to the passenger gem;
  passenger_ruby # Path to the ruby shim, from rbenv;

All of my config is in the http section. I’d guess that I can have other sections for different protocols, but this is just a basic web server so all I need is HTTP.

The include mime types line will make nginx serve static files with the correct Content-Type header for the file extension, which is why serving from this works for my Jenkins server but GitLab doesn’t.

server {
  location / {
    root /var/www/blog;
  }
}

This section defines a default server - anything that doesn’t match will just be sent to this, for example foobar.javanut.net will just go to the main blog. I could add more things in here if I wanted a subsection to go to somewhere else - maybe I wanted to serve some other content at javanut.net/my_stuff. I could just make a new location block and set the root to be a different location on my server.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name static.javanut.net;
  root /var/www/static;
}

This is basically the same as the previous section, it’s just another static file server that points to a different folder. The main point here is that the server_name has been set, so that it is only accessible on static.javanut.net. In the previous example, the location {} block is probably unnecessary as it isn’t needed here.

  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name my_rails_app.javanut.net;
    root /var/www/my_rails_app/current/public;
    passenger_enabled on;
  }
}

Again this is very similar, but this is for a Rails app using passenger. Passenger needs to be installed when nginx is compiled - there is no plugin system for nginx.