Comprehensive Nginx Tutorial: Installation, Reverse Proxy, Load Balancing, Static/Dynamic Separation, and High‑Availability Setup

This article provides a complete tutorial on Nginx, covering its overview, installation, configuration, and advanced usage scenarios.

Chapter 1 – Nginx Overview : Introduces Nginx as a high‑performance HTTP and reverse‑proxy server used by major Chinese sites such as Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba.

Chapter 2 – Single‑Instance Installation : Shows how to prepare the environment, install dependencies, download the source, compile and install Nginx, and start the service.

# yum install -y gcc gcc-c++ make libtool wget pcre pcre-devel zlib zlib-devel openssl openssl-devel<br/># wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.18.0.tar.gz<br/># tar -zxvf nginx-1.18.0.tar.gz<br/># cd nginx-1.18.0<br/># ./configure<br/># make && make install<br/># /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

Chapter 3 – Reverse Proxy : Demonstrates configuring Nginx as a reverse proxy for Tomcat, including location directives, proxy_pass, and example host mappings.

# vi /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf<br/>location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; }

Chapter 4 – Load Balancing : Explains upstream blocks, different balancing algorithms (round‑robin, weight, ip_hash, fair), and shows how to test load distribution across multiple backend ports.

# upstream myserver { server 192.168.206.128:8080; server 192.168.206.128:8081; }<br/>location / { proxy_pass http://myserver; }

Chapter 5 – Static/Dynamic Separation : Shows how to serve static files directly from Nginx while proxying dynamic requests to Tomcat, using a separate root directory for static assets.

Chapter 6 – High‑Availability Cluster : Details setting up a master‑slave Nginx cluster with keepalived, configuring virtual IP, health‑check scripts, and failover procedures.

# yum install -y keepalived<br/># vi /etc/keepalived/keepalived.conf ...

Chapter 7 – Detailed Configuration : Reviews global, events, http, server, and location blocks, explaining key directives such as worker_processes, worker_connections, sendfile, gzip, and access logs.

Chapter 8 – Nginx Internals : Describes Nginx’s multi‑process model, worker contention, connection counting, and formulas for estimating maximum concurrent connections for static and proxy workloads.