Master Nginx: From Installation to Advanced Configuration on CentOS

Nginx is a lightweight web server, reverse proxy, and mail (IMAP/POP3) proxy released under a BSD‑like license. It uses little memory, handles high concurrency, and powers major Chinese sites such as Baidu, JD, Sina, NetEase, Tencent, and Taobao.

Why use Nginx?

Compared with Apache, Nginx consumes fewer resources, supports many more concurrent connections, and is favored by virtual‑host providers. It can handle up to 50,000 concurrent connections, uses epoll/kqueue, and serves as an efficient load‑balancer and HTTP proxy.

Key differences

Apache uses a synchronous multi‑process model (one process per connection); Nginx uses an asynchronous event‑driven model allowing thousands of connections per process.

Apache excels at dynamic content; Nginx excels at static content with lower CPU and memory usage.

Basic usage

System platform: CentOS 6.6 (64‑bit).

Installation Steps

1. Install build tools and libraries

Install PCRE (required for rewrite support) from

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pcre/pcre/8.35/pcre-8.35.tar.gz

, then extract and compile.

2. Install Nginx

Download Nginx source http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.6.2.tar.gz, extract, enter the directory, and run ./configure && make && make install. Verify the installation with nginx -v.

Configuration

Create a system user for Nginx: useradd -r -s /sbin/nologin www Replace /usr/local/webserver/nginx/conf/nginx.conf with the appropriate configuration (see image). Test the configuration with nginx -t.

Starting Nginx

Start the server using: nginx Verify by accessing the server IP in a browser.

Common Directives

1. Main (global) configuration

worker_processes 2

– number of worker processes (often set to CPU cores). worker_cpu_affinity – bind workers to specific CPUs for performance. worker_connections 2048 – max connections per worker. worker_rlimit_nofile 10240 – limit on open file descriptors. use epoll – high‑efficiency event model on Linux.

2. HTTP server

sendfile on

– enable zero‑copy file transmission. keepalive_timeout 65 – timeout for persistent connections. client_max_body_size 10m – maximum upload size.

3. Server (virtual host)

listen 80

– port to listen on. server_name example.com – host name.

4. Location

root /var/www/html

– document root. index index.html index.htm – default index files. proxy_pass http://backend – forward requests to upstream servers.

Additional Features

Access control with allow / deny, directory listing via autoindex on, and gzip compression settings ( gzip on, gzip_min_length 1k, etc.) are also covered.