NGINX – APACHE 2

At Takelan, I’ve been looking into having support servers in front of every apache & MySQL installation to avoid clogging the servers with rendering pages. So we thought about how we can take some load out of the servers. We’ve been looking into Cloudflare, but we like being able to manage every single aspect of our infrastructure.

To make sure we provide to clients the best service available.

Finally, last night we made the first deployment and try out with a Drupal website [this drupal website], and testing if it failed at any point.

We are now working on automated scripts that should take over the infrastructure in a network outage, power failure, or hardware failure.

That would be what we’re trying to accomplish here, so I’ve thought about sharing what we’ve been doing around here. Of course, we’ll skip some parts that use programs and helpers developed in the company.

So our testbed for this was: Debian 7, Apache 2, MySQL [Apache Server] => Check Server element in the menu.

And the Nginx server is in Secaucus, NJ and its Debian 6, has Apache, MySQL and Nginx.

The first was to change our DNS, so www.derekdemuro.com(link is external) and derekdemuro. I pointed to the server in Secaucus [Ping this website for the IP], second, was to configure Nginx as to reverse proxy this server.

There’s a trick though, both servers have DNS Servers, and indeed the server in New Jersey has a Slave zone of www.derekdemuro.com(link is external); why? To avoid having Nginx looking up for the domain

So let me share here the configs!

Files:

Reverse Caching Proxy = /etc/nginx/proxy.conf

Nginx Configuriation = /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Mime Types = /etc/nginx/mime.conf

Sites Enabled Folders = /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ =>Sites

Reverse Caching Config.

proxy_redirect                  off;
proxy_set_header                Host            $host;
proxy_set_header                X-Real-IP       $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header                X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
#proxy_set_header Cookie $http_cookie;
 
proxy_cache                     dynamic;
proxy_cache_key "$scheme://$host$proxy_host$uri$is_args$args";
proxy_cache_valid               200 301 302 20m;        # Cache pages for 20mins
proxy_cache_valid               200 304 7d;                     # Cache pages for 7day
proxy_cache_valid               301 302 1h;                     # Cache pages for 1 hour
proxy_cache_valid               404 403 402 401 504 502 20m;    # Cache Other errors for 20mins
proxy_cache_valid               any 15m;                        # Cache others for 15 minute
proxy_cache_valid               404 1m;                         # Cache errors for 1 minute
proxy_cache_use_stale           error timeout invalid_header updating;
 
proxy_connect_timeout           180;
proxy_send_timeout              180;
proxy_read_timeout              180;
 
proxy_buffers                   8 16k;
proxy_buffer_size               32k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size         64k;
proxy_temp_file_write_size      64k;
 
proxy_pass_header               Expires;
proxy_pass_header               Cache-Control;
proxy_pass_header               Last-Modified;
proxy_pass_header               ETag;
proxy_pass_header               Content-Length;
 
# only honor internal Caching policies
proxy_ignore_headers X-Accel-Expires;
 
# let cookies from the backend pass
proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;

nginx.conf

#Run as webuser to minimize permission conflict
user  www-data www-data;
 
# For high performance you'll need one worker process per disk spindle
# but in most cases 1 or 2 is fine.
worker_processes  1;
 
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log debug;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
 
events {
        # Max concurrent connections = worker_processes * worker_connections
        # You can increase this past 1024 but you must set the rlimit before starting
        # ngxinx using the ulimit command (say ulimit -n 8192)
 
        worker_connections  1024;
        #Linux performance awesomeness on
        use epoll;
}
 
http {
        #server_name_hash_bucket_size 64;
        #Mime stuff
        #Mime-type table
        include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
        default_type  application/octet-stream;
 
        #Size Limits
        client_max_body_size            200M;
        client_body_buffer_size         8M;
        client_header_buffer_size       128k;
        large_client_header_buffers     1 8k;
    server_names_hash_max_size 10240;
    server_names_hash_bucket_size 1024;
 
        #Time out
        client_body_timeout             120;
        client_header_timeout           120;
        send_timeout                    120;
        keepalive_timeout               60 60;
 
        ignore_invalid_headers          on;
        recursive_error_pages           on;
 
        # Where to store the body of large client requests on disk
        # NGINX will stream this to disk before posting it to your Mongrels,
        # preventing slow clients tying up your app.
        proxy_cache_path /home/cache/dynamic levels=1:2 keys_zone=dynamic:1024m inactive=7d max_size=1000m;
        proxy_cache_path /home/cache/static levels=1:2 keys_zone=static:1024m inactive=7d max_size=1000m;
        log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
        #Compression
        gzip on;
        gzip_http_version 1.0;
        gzip_comp_level 2;
        gzip_proxied any;
        gzip_min_length 1100;
        gzip_buffers 16 8k;
        #Some version of IE 6 don't handle compression well on some mime-types, so just diable for them
        gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)";
        #Set a vary header so downstream proxies don't send cached gzipped content to IE6
        gzip_vary on;
 
        server_tokens   off;
 
        sendfile        on;
        tcp_nopush      on;
        tcp_nodelay     on;
        #keepalive_requests 0;
    include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/site.com

## Apache (vm02) backend for www.example.com ##
upstream mdsite {
    server static.site.me:80; #Apache1
}
server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  www.site.me site.me;
    access_log /home/cache/logs/site.me.access.log;
    error_log /home/cache/logs/site.me.error.log debug;
 
    # If request is different from GET, HEAD or POST it will return the error code 444
    if ($request_method !~ ^(GET|HEAD|POST)$ ) {
        return 444;
    }
    # All files are cashed for 120 minutes and up to 200 pages, this have to be removed
    location / {
        proxy_cache dynamic;
        expires 2h;
        proxy_pass https://mdsite $request_uri;
        # If the backend server send one of these error Nginx will serve from cashed files
        proxy_cache_use_stale error timeout invalid_header updating;
    }
    # Static files are cashed for 2 days
    location  ^~.(swf|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {
        proxy_cache static;
        proxy_pass https://mdsite $request_uri;
        expires max;
    }
 
    # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
    #
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }
}