nginx

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nginx: how to specify a default server

Several years ago when I started using nginx, I was under the mistaken assumption that

server_name _;

was a wildcard server name and would be used if no other server names matched.

Nope.

I made a change on a production system, adding a new site on an existing IP address.  What harm could that cause, right?

After several clients quickly and graciously notified us that the wrong site was coming up when you visited their domain, I quickly tracked the problem down.

First you need to realize that server_name _ is actually not special.  It is just a non-match.

Second you need to realize that in the event of no matches, nginx will select the first server{} block and use that.

This means that the ORDER of your server blocks is critical if you are using `server_name _;`. 

In our case, the order was incorrect, and my new domain was picking up all requests for that IP address.  I tell this because I believe a number of system administrators have this incorrectly configured and waiting to bite them.

There is a better way.

The nginx `listen` directive includes a `default_server` option that looks like this:

server{
   listen 1.2.3.4:80 default_server;
   ...
}

From http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#listen

If the directive has the default_server parameter, then the enclosing server {…} block will be the default server for the address:port pair. This is useful for name-based virtual hosting where you wish to specify the default server block for hostnames that do not match any server_name directives. If there are no directives with the default_server parameter, then the default server will be the first server block in which the address:port pair appears.

The moral of the story

It is better to use the correct mechanism (above) than relying on a single non-matching server_name.

I hope someone finds this useful!

Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9454764/nginx-server-name-wildcard-or-catch-all

 

 

 

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nginx + apache + mod_wsgi + python: how to make dynamic pages expire

When writing dynamic web applications, we use nginx as a front-end web server and apache+mod_wsgi as an application server.

It is the job of nginx to:

  1. Handle SSL, and domain-level rewriting/redirects
  2. Handle static content (.jpeg, .png, .css, .js, .txt, .ico, .pdf, etc….)
  3. Handle dynamic downloads through X-Accel-Redirect
  4. Proxy other requests to apache
  5. Set the proper cache-control and expires headers on content

Ever run into the situation where you click log out, and then click the back button, and are still able to see the pages!  That is bad.   They are dynamic pages anyway, and should not be cached.

However, images, etc… SHOULD be cached. It is important that any references to images have a way to invalidate the cache. We append a number as a query string:

/path/to/script.js?192012129

This number is updated from time to time (via Python variable) when we need to invalidate the cache.

Anyway, here are some helpful nginx configuration directives.

# Send static requests directly back to the client
location ~ \.(gif|jpg|png|ico|xml|html|css|js|txt|pdf)$
{
    root  /path/to/document/root;
    expires max;
}

# Send the rest to apache
location /
{
    add_header Cache-Control 'no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate';
    add_header Expires 'Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT';
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8123;
}
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nginx restart error

Was playing around with nginx on Centos 5 (EPEL package).

Most of the time I ran:

service nginx restart

I would get this message in the /var/log/nginx/error.log file:

panic: MUTEX_LOCK (22) [op.c:352].

After some hunting around, it appears to be a known bug in nginx (perhaps perl in nginx?)… Anyway, a simple workaround is to do this:

service nginx stop
service nginx start

Or, simply edit /etc/init.d/nginx, and add the sleep 1 line:

51 restart() {
52     configtest || return $?
53     stop
54     sleep 1
55     start
56 }

Nice workround!