Nginx webserver setup

After having written my website by hand for years, I’ve switched to the pelican website generator. To test this generated site I needed a webserver.

Over the years I’ve used apache, lighttpd and thttpd. But none of those really worked like I wanted to. So I thought I would try nginx.

Since it is in the FreeBSD ports, installing it was easy;

# cd /usr/ports/www/nginx
# make config
# make install clean

There are a lot of optional enhancement modules available for nginx, but I only activated a couple of them;

http

http_cache

http_rewrite

file aio

http_fancyindex

With the documentation from the wiki, settting it up was not that hard. Below is the configuration file used for serving my simple static website (updated 2016-12-11);

# file: nginx.conf
# vim:fileencoding=utf-8:ft=conf
#
# Author: R.F. Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl>
# Created: 2016-09-23 22:19:55 +0200
# Last modified: 2016-12-11 18:34:51 +0100

user  www www;
worker_processes  1;

events {
    use kqueue;
    multi_accept on;
    worker_connections  2048;
}

http {
    server_tokens off;
    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    access_log off;

    keepalive_timeout 10;
    client_header_timeout 10;
    client_body_timeout 10;
    reset_timedout_connection on;
    send_timeout 10;

    limit_conn_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=addr:5m;
    limit_conn addr 100;

    include mime.types;
    default_type text/html;
    charset UTF-8;

    gzip on;
    gzip_disable "msie6";
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_min_length 1000;
    gzip_buffers 16 8k;
    gzip_comp_level 4;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    server { # Standard static website
        server_name www.erewhon.home;
        listen localhost:80;
        root /home/www;
        index index.html;
        error_page  404 /404.html;
        location = /404.html {
            root /usr/local/www;
        }
        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root /usr/local/www/nginx-dist;
        }
    }
    server { # For serving media files on the network
        server_name media.erewhon.home;
        listen localhost:80;
        root /home/media;
        fancyindex on;
        fancyindex_exact_size off;
    }
}

In my /etc/hosts file, the name www.erewhon.net resolves to the localhost. As a security precaution, I’ve restricted nginx to only listen on the localhost address.

For comments, please send me an e-mail.

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