Posts tagged 'Nginx'

Integrating Nginx and a Shibboleth SP with FastCGI

New location!

The canonical place for this documentation is now the nginx-http-shibboleth custom Nginx module GitHub repository. All updates will be reflected there, and as a result, this page has become severely outdated. Please contribute to that repository!

Original post

Note

With changes in Nginx after version 1.5.4, the auth request module is now built in. This means the following instruction have changed, yet again.

tl;dr: You can have Nginx with Shibboleth. Rebuild Shibboleth with FastCGI support, and recompile Nginx with a custom module. You can now run the Shibboleth FastCGI authorizer and responder applications and successfully …

Switching to Nginx from Cherokee: Techincal Guide

This is a follow up to a previous post on Switching to Nginx from Cherokee. Read that in case you’re here and haven’t already.

All information here on a server level is related to RHEL 6. You will need to change some instructions for Debian based systems. CentOS should be fine and needs only a minor URL change in the repo configuration.

  1. Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo and add this:

    [nginx]
    name=nginx repo
    baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/rhel/$releasever/$basearch/
    gpgcheck=0
    enabled=1
    
  2. Run yum install nginx to install Nginx.

  3. Start rebuilding your …

Switching to Nginx from Cherokee: Why

After a switching away from Apache some time ago, our primary web server had been running Cherokee for quite a while - since September 2011, in fact, looking back at the configuration history. More recently, however, I’ve switched us again. This time to Nginx - with impressive improvements in performance and configurability (10x for some static files) — and reliability.

Note

See my technical guide for technical info about switching.

Background

Originally, the selection of Cherokee as web server software looked promising - the Cherokee project had been around for a while, was gathering support, had a reasonable level of uptake, and consistent …

Serving uWSGI Apps on a Sub-directory with Nginx

Serving up uWSGI application using Nginx is super-simple and is configured effectively like a standard reverse proxy_pass. However, the documentation isn’t entirely clear exactly how one can correctly serve an application against a sub-directory — and have the application know its correct path such that it can create correct URLs.

Coming from a background of using the Cherokee webserver, uWSGI operated slightly differently within its configuration. This behaviour, as best I know, must have modified the given uWSGI parameters to correctly handle the sub-directory path. I haven’t looked into it, but it probably just does the same thing that …