General

Overview

Nginx is a high performance webserver used as a replacement for Apache, which can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.

Nginx uses an asynchronous event-driven approach, rather than threads, to handle requests. Nginx's modular event-driven architecture can provide more predictable performance under high loads.

HTTP proxy and Web server features (adopted to DirectAdmin's implementation)

  • Ability to handle more than 10,000 simultaneous connections with a low memory footprint (~2.5 MB per 10k inactive HTTP keep-alive connections)
  • Handling of static files, index files and auto-indexing
  • Reverse proxy with caching
  • TLS/SSL with SNI and OCSP stapling support, via OpenSSL
  • FastCGI support with caching
  • Name- and IP address-based virtual servers
  • IPv6-compatible
  • WebSockets, which can act as a reverse proxy and perform load balancing of WebSocket applications
  • HTTP/1.1 Upgrade (101 Switching Protocols), HTTP/2 protocol support
  • URL rewriting and redirection via custom configuration

How to install NGINX

The higher performance will come at the cost of a slightly reduced feature set. Nginx requires CustomBuild 2.0 and for the PHP mode to be PHP-FPM.

To install Nginx (with PHP-FPM):

da build set webserver nginx
da build set php1_mode php-fpm
da build nginx
da build php
da build rewrite_confs

How to install ModSecurity

Use the same guide as is used for Apache.

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