From Beginner to Pro: 113‑Page Comprehensive Nginx Study Guide

Nginx is widely used in large‑scale websites, web applications, and mobile apps because of its outstanding performance, high concurrency handling, and low memory consumption.

When deploying a website, Nginx is often the first choice for medium and large projects or micro‑service architectures, while smaller projects may use IIS or Tomcat.

The tutorial is organized into eight chapters spanning 113 pages, ranging from basic introductions to practical applications. The main sections include:

Web service basics

Nginx fundamentals

Detailed core configuration

Nginx Rewrite features

Reverse‑proxy functionality

Four‑layer access control

System parameter optimization

LNMP project – WordPress site setup

Nginx architecture : Nginx follows a multi‑process model consisting of a master process and multiple worker processes.

Master process responsibilities :

Read and validate configuration files

Create, bind, and close socket connections

Manage worker processes (start, stop, reload)

Accept external commands such as restart, upgrade, or shutdown

Perform graceful upgrades without service interruption

Open log files and obtain file descriptors

Handle upgrade rollbacks on failure

Compile and execute Perl scripts

Worker process responsibilities :

Accept and process client requests

Dispatch requests to appropriate functional modules

Perform I/O operations to retrieve response data

Communicate with backend servers and receive processing results

Cache data and query cache indices

Send response back to the client

Receive commands from the master process (restart, upgrade, exit)

Core configuration : Virtual hosts are defined based on IP, port, and domain name using the ngx_http_core_module. Example: creating a "Mobile web" site.

Location directive usage is illustrated with detailed examples (images omitted for brevity).

Four‑layer access control is implemented via the ngx_http_access_module, allowing IP‑based request filtering.

File existence detection uses try_files, which checks a list of files in order and performs an internal redirect to the last parameter if none are found; the final parameter must exist to avoid a 500 error.

Reverse proxy (reverse proxy) forwards external client requests to internal web servers and returns the responses, a common deployment pattern.

Logical call relationship and production environment deployment structure are shown with diagrams (images omitted).

Nginx file display provides a visual overview of configuration files and directory layout.