What Nginx Can Do Without Third‑Party Modules: Reverse Proxy, Load Balancing, HTTP Server, and More

Nginx Capabilities Without Third‑Party Modules

Reverse proxy

Load balancing (RR, weight, ip_hash, fair, url_hash)

HTTP server (static files and dynamic/static separation)

Forward proxy

The following sections describe each capability and show how to configure it using only the built‑in features of Nginx.

Reverse Proxy

A reverse proxy receives client requests from the Internet and forwards them to internal servers, returning the responses to the clients. A simple reverse‑proxy configuration looks like this:

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;
    client_max_body_size 1024M;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
        proxy_set_header Host $host:$server_port;
    }
}

After saving the configuration and starting Nginx, accessing http://localhost will actually serve content from http://localhost:8080 .

Load Balancing

Load balancing distributes requests across multiple backend servers. Nginx provides several built‑in strategies and supports additional third‑party methods.

Round‑Robin (default)

upstream test {
    server localhost:8080;
    server localhost:8081;
}
server {
    listen       81;
    server_name  localhost;
    client_max_body_size 1024M;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://test;
        proxy_set_header Host $host:$server_port;
    }
}

Weight

upstream test {
    server localhost:8080 weight=9;
    server localhost:8081 weight=1;
}

With the above settings, roughly 9 out of 10 requests go to localhost:8080 and 1 out of 10 to localhost:8081 .

ip_hash

upstream test {
    ip_hash;
    server localhost:8080;
    server localhost:8081;
}

Requests from the same client IP are consistently routed to the same backend, which helps when sessions are stored locally.

fair (third‑party)

upstream backend {
    fair;
    server localhost:8080;
    server localhost:8081;
}

url_hash (third‑party)

upstream backend {
    hash $request_uri;
    hash_method crc32;
    server localhost:8080;
    server localhost:8081;
}

Each of the five strategies suits different scenarios; note that fair and url_hash require third‑party modules, which are not covered here.

HTTP Server

Nginx can serve static files directly. A minimal static‑file server configuration is:

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;
    client_max_body_size 1024M;

    location / {
        root   e:\wwwroot;
        index  index.html;
    }
}

Visiting http://localhost will return e:\wwwroot\index.html .

Dynamic/Static Separation

upstream test {
    server localhost:8080;
    server localhost:8081;
}
server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;

    location / {
        root   e:\wwwroot;
        index  index.html;
    }

    # Static resources handled by Nginx
    location ~ \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|bmp|swf|css|js)$ {
        root    e:\wwwroot;
    }

    # Dynamic requests forwarded to Tomcat
    location ~ \.(jsp|do)$ {
        proxy_pass  http://test;
    }

    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root e:\wwwroot;
    }
}

This setup serves static assets directly while proxying dynamic requests (e.g., JSP) to a backend application server.

Forward Proxy

A forward proxy sits between a client and the origin server. A basic forward‑proxy configuration is:

resolver 114.114.114.114 8.8.8.8;
server {
    resolver_timeout 5s;
    listen 81;
    access_log  e:\wwwroot\proxy.access.log;
    error_log   e:\wwwroot\proxy.error.log;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://$host$request_uri;
    }
}

Clients can configure their browsers or proxy tools to use IP:81 as the proxy server.

Managing Nginx

Common commands for starting, stopping, and reloading Nginx:

/etc/init.d/nginx start/restart   # start or restart Nginx service
/etc/init.d/nginx stop            # stop Nginx service
/etc/nginx/nginx.conf            # location of the main configuration file
nginx -s reload                   # reload configuration without stopping the service

Nginx supports hot reload, so changes to the configuration take effect immediately after running the reload command.