Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

The HTTP core module

The http module is NGINX's central module; it handles all interactions with clients over HTTP. We already discussed the following aspects of this module in Chapter 2, A Configuration Guide:

• Client directives
• File I/O directives
• Hash directives
• Socket directives
• The listen directive
• Matching a request to a server_name and location directive

We will have a look at the remaining directives in the rest of this section, again divided by type.

The server directive

The server directive starts a new context. We have already seen examples of its usage throughout the book so far. One aspect that has not yet been examined in-depth is the concept of a default server.

A default server in NGINX means that it is the first server defined in a particular ...