Nginx Cheat Sheet: Common Configuration Snippets

Nginx is a high‑performance HTTP and reverse‑proxy web server that also offers IMAP/POP3/SMTP services, and it is widely appreciated for its rich feature set, stability, example configuration files, and low system‑resource consumption.

The article summarizes a set of commonly used Nginx configuration snippets that can be directly copied into nginx.conf to handle typical scenarios.

Listening Ports

server {<br/># Standard HTTP Protocol<br/>listen 80;<br/># Standard HTTPS Protocol<br/>listen 443 ssl;<br/># For http2<br/>listen 443 ssl http2;<br/># Listen on 80 using IPv6<br/>listen [::]:80;<br/># Listen only on using IPv6<br/>listen [::]:80 ipv6only=on;<br/>}

Access Logs

server {<br/># Relative or full path to log file<br/>access_log /path/to/file.log;<br/># Turn 'on' or 'off'<br/>access_log on;<br/>}

Server Name (Domain)

server {<br/># Listen to yourdomain.com<br/>server_name yourdomain.com;<br/># Listen to multiple domains<br/>server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;<br/># Listen to all domains<br/>server_name *.yourdomain.com;<br/># Listen to all top‑level domains<br/>server_name yourdomain.*;<br/># Listen to unspecified Hostnames (IP address itself)<br/>server_name "";<br/>}

Static Assets

server {<br/>listen 80;<br/>server_name yourdomain.com;<br/>location / {<br/>root /path/to/website;<br/>}<br/>}

Redirects

server {<br/>listen 80;<br/>server_name www.yourdomain.com;<br/>return 301 http://yourdomain.com$request_uri;<br/>}<br/>server {<br/>listen 80;<br/>server_name www.yourdomain.com;<br/>location /redirect-url {<br/>return 301 http://otherdomain.com;<br/>}<br/>}

Reverse Proxy

server {<br/>listen 80;<br/>server_name yourdomain.com;<br/>location / {<br/>proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:3000;<br/># where 0.0.0.0:3000 is your application server (e.g., node.js) bound on port 3000<br/>}<br/>}

Load Balancing

upstream node_js {<br/>server 0.0.0.0:3000;<br/>server 0.0.0.0:4000;<br/>server 123.131.121.122;<br/>}<br/>server {<br/>listen 80;<br/>server_name yourdomain.com;<br/>location / {<br/>proxy_pass http://node_js;<br/>}<br/>}

SSL Configuration

server {<br/>listen 443 ssl;<br/>server_name yourdomain.com;<br/>ssl on;<br/>ssl_certificate /path/to/cert.pem;<br/>ssl_certificate_key /path/to/privatekey.pem;<br/>ssl_stapling on;<br/>ssl_stapling_verify on;<br/>ssl_trusted_certificate /path/to/fullchain.pem;<br/>ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;<br/>ssl_session_timeout 1h;<br/>ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:50m;<br/>add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;<br/>}<br/># Permanent Redirect for HTTP to HTTPS<br/>server {<br/>listen 80;<br/>server_name yourdomain.com;<br/>return 301 https://$host$request_uri;<br/>}

These snippets cover the most common use‑cases such as reverse proxying, HTTPS, HTTP/2, IPv6, caching, WordPress, CDN, Node.js, and Python (Django) deployments, and they can be generated automatically with tools like nginxconfig.io or the open‑source project on GitHub.