Nginx.

Everybody talks about it.

Nobody really knows what it does.

But it’s easy to be confused.

Because Nginx can do all of it and do it well.

It creates web servers that are lightweight, fast, and efficient.

It’s used as a reverse proxy to handle millions of incoming traffic.

This year, it powers over 33% of the web.

Let’s see how it works.

Nginx web servers work exactly like any others you created with Node.js or Django.

But instead of writing JavaScript, you modify the nginx config file.

Let’s create an HTTP server that listens on PORT 3000.

The config file consists of directives.

There are two types of directives:

To make a functioning web server, we need to handle the request and response.

Now any request to the root URL would return a “hello world” text and a status code 200.

The same Node.js code would look like this:

It’s cool but nothing special.

A more common use case of Nginx is a reverse proxy.

This is where it really shines.

What’s a reverse proxy?

A proxy is like a vpn for clients.

A reverse proxy is a vpn for servers.

It reroutes requests from clients to the servers.

Why the extra step?

It’s very easy to create a reverse proxy in Nginx.

First, create another block.

Notice the only change here from the previous example is that we are using proxy_pass instead of returning a text.

Instead of handling the request, we pass it to a server with the IP address “127.0.0.1:4000.”

Before:

After:

But more often, we want to use it as a load balancer and route the requests to three different servers.

So, let’s create a group of servers called “backend_servers.”

Then route the requests to this group of servers:

And you have just created a reverse proxy server with Nginx.

Fee from Anime Coders

PS: This is how I feel when reading the Nginx doc