**UPDATE: **I'm reworking my config blending in the security ideas found on [camomel.org](https://calomel.org/nginx.html) they're really thought things through on this, this should make for a very secure environment.
I'm always trying new software, and with the webserver I've moved from Apache 1.3 to 2.0 to 2.2, and then later I moved everything over to Lighttpd, which I've liked, save for some memory issues that popped up. Now, enter a web server named [nginx](http://nginx.net/) (engine x), written by a Russian hacker. It's already proved it's meddle by running some of the largest Russian sites for years now. It has the [speed of Lighttpd](http://superjared.com/entry/benching-lighttpd-vs-nginx-static-files/), but with none of that memory weirdness, plus it uses a fraction of the CPU, so scaling should be smooth for highly visited sites. It also does cool things like load balancing, reverse proxy, IMAP and POP proxy, etc, so I can see it being used in a variety of ways on a network. It took me some time to understand [how to configure it](http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main), which was a case of me just making it harder than it really is, so I wanted to post it here. Look for updates as we go along, but this is currently backing a Production site I manage.
user www-data www-data;
worker_processes 5;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
log_format main '$remote_addr $host $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
'$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" '
'"$request_time" "$gzip_ratio"';
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay off;
keepalive_timeout 65;
gzip on;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
#gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_min_length 1000;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/json application/x-javascript
text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
server {
listen 80;
client_max_body_size 50M;
server_name server.domain.com;
root /var/www;
index index.html index.php;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main;
error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
location = /500.html {
root /var/www;
}
location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif)$ {
root /var/www;
expires 30d;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
}
}
}