Configuring nginx

Purpose

Guide engineers through configuring nginx for common web infrastructure needs: static file serving, reverse proxying backend applications, load balancing across multiple servers, SSL/TLS termination, caching, and performance optimization. Provides production-ready configurations with security best practices.

When to Use This Skill

Use when working with:

• Setting up web server for static sites or single-page applications
• Configuring reverse proxy for Node.js, Python, Ruby, or Go applications
• Implementing load balancing across multiple backend servers
• Terminating SSL/TLS for HTTPS traffic
• Adding caching layer for performance improvement
• Building API gateway functionality
• Protecting against DDoS with rate limiting
• Proxying WebSocket connections

Trigger phrases: "configure nginx", "nginx reverse proxy", "nginx load balancer", "enable SSL in nginx", "nginx performance tuning", "nginx caching", "nginx rate limiting"

Installation

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install nginx -y
sudo systemctl enable nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx

RHEL/CentOS/Rocky:

sudo dnf install nginx -y
sudo systemctl enable nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx

Docker:

docker run -d -p 80:80 -v /path/to/config:/etc/nginx/conf.d nginx:alpine

Quick Start Examples

Static Website

Serve HTML/CSS/JS files from a directory:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    root /var/www/example.com/html;
    index index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js|woff2)$ {
        expires 1y;
        add_header Cache-Control "public, immutable";
    }
}

Enable site:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

See references/static-sites.md for SPA configurations and advanced patterns.