Nginx Server Configs

Nginx Server Configs is a collection of configuration snippets that can help your server improve the web site's performance and security, while also ensuring that resources are served with the correct content-type and are accessible, if needed, even cross-domain.

Getting Started

• Nginx Beginners Guide
• Nginx Request Processing
• How Nginx works — Understanding nginx, and how it differs from other webservers.

Basic structure

This repository has the following structure:

./
├── conf.d/
│   ├── default.conf
│	  └── templates/
├── h5bp/
│   ├── basic.conf
│   ├── location/
│   └── .../
├── mime.types
└── nginx.conf

• conf.d/

  This directory should contain all of the server definitions.

  Except if they are dot prefixed or non .conf extension, all files in this folder are loaded automatically.

  • templates folder

    Files in this folder contain a server{} template for secure and non-secure hosts. They are intended to be copied in the conf.d folder with all example.com occurrences changed to the target host.

• h5bp/

  This directory contains config snippets (mixins) to be included as desired.

  There are two types of config files provided, individual config snippets and combined config files which provide convenient defaults.

  • basic.conf

    This file loads a small subset of the rules provided by this repository to add expires headers, allow cross domain fonts and protect system files from web access.

  • location/

    Files in this folder contain one or more location directives. They are intended to be loaded in the server context (or, in a nested location block).

• mime.types

  The mime.types file is responsible for mapping file extensions to mime types.

• nginx.conf

  The main nginx config file.

Other resources

• Troubleshooting — Dealing with commonly-encountered errors.
• Hotlink protection

Usage

As a reference

To use as reference requires no special installation steps, download/checkout the repository to a convenient location and adapt your existing nginx configuration incorporating the desired functionality from this repository.

Directly

To use directly, replace the nginx config directory with this repository. for example:

nginx stop
cd /etc
mv nginx nginx-previous
git clone https://github.com/h5bp/server-configs-nginx.git nginx
# install-specific edits
nginx start

Manage sites

$ cd /etc/nginx/conf.d

• Creating a new site

  $ cp templates/example.com.conf .actual-hostname.conf
  $ sed -i 's/example.com/actual-hostname/g' .actual-hostname.conf
  

• Enabling a site

  $ mv .actual-hostname.conf actual-hostname.conf
  

• Disabling a site

  $ mv actual-hostname.conf .actual-hostname.conf
  

$ nginx reload

Support

• Nginx v1.6.0+

Contributing

Anyone is welcome to contribute, however, if you decide to get involved, please take a moment to review the guidelines:

• Bug reports
• Feature requests
• Pull requests

Acknowledgements

Nginx Server Configs is only possible thanks to all the awesome contributors!

License

The code is available under the MIT license.