Show HN: Nginx Common Useful Configuration | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Nginx Common Useful Configuration

github.com

77 pointsfrizzy12 comments

Hi guys, I agree with you that today there are a lot of better web servers like traefik, caddy and so one, but nginx is still popular and so one people use it wrong... So I decided to open source my own variant of configs for it)

I don't think you should feel a need to defend this. It's one of the more popular web servers on the Internet, and this looks like a great resource for it.

I would appreciate it, if you could annotate the config choices you made with the reason behind them. Example: sendfile on; # default is off tcp_nopush on; # default is off tcp_nodelay on; Why did you set those to on? What improvements do I get compared to the defaults?

Hey, thank you for suggestion, I'll think about it)

glad to see this posted. nginx has driven me crazy the past 4 days. After reading and reading and reading, and experimenting.. I have a feeling that when I ran lets encrypt certbot, it added some things in files that were needed, but became a problem when I actually made the config files that were needed to point to the new folders.. I'm still not sure actually.

I ended up just adding another domain name and configuring it from scratch to point to a matrix client folder, and then running the certbot expand.. and now it's working on a different domain.

Guides like this one posted are much more help trying understand the whole chain of things as opposed to a bunch of random pseduo answers via stackover and the like.

We are what, 6 or 7 years after Let's Encrypt changed how we deal with certificates? The fact that nginx still requires the perfect incantation of certbot, cronjobs and whatnot is mind-boggling.

I love nginx but it's hard to recommend it when other solutions exist that require zero fiddling and zero maintenance to get HTTPS working.

I really wish there was some better process than certbot for getting certificates. Feels sketchy as hell to have that thing running on my servers.

What would you recommend?

After switching to Traefik, I haven't looked back. I prefer the fully open source options of HAProxy or Traefik to the feature-paywalled "free tier" nginx of today. Capability wise, between the two they have everything ngx has and more*. Also, have you ever tried compiling ngx yourself (they don't include Lua modules support in their k8s Docker images)? It's not easy, interesting, or fun. More of a nightmare.

Finally, I sure don't miss feeling the urge to bookmark config helper articles like this one- nginx is challenging to configure well! Endless hidden options, and for whatever reason I found their documentation less helpful than HAProxy's.

If you are forced to continue using it, you have my sympathy.

* I've created some rather exotic LB setups as times to meet requirements.

> Also, have you ever tried compiling ngx yourself (they don't include Lua modules support

There's always OpenResty[1] which is a kind of "batteries included" version of nginx - I use it in preference to nginx these days because I do a lot of experiments with, e.g., the Lua, Redis, Postgres support OR has.

[1] https://openresty.org/en/

It suddenly feels like Nginx is a legacy system, in the same way Apache became a legacy system when Nginx was launched. If I need a web server my first instinct is to reach for Caddy, or if I just need a reverse-proxy then it's either Caddy or Traefik.

Do you have any recommendations for resources comparing Caddy and Traefik? I think I’m done with using nginx in personal projects and whatnot, but haven’t really looked into anything other than nginx (and Apache as necessity demands) for 5+ years now.

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