Wiki source code of Nginx: useful configuration directives

Last modified by Alexandru Pentilescu on 2023/06/25 18:58

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	5	= Nginx: useful configuration directives =
	6	This article will function along the lines of a //Tips and tricks//-style article, where I'll be showing off various configuration directives for nginx to use in the wild to achieve specific purposes.
	7	Hopefully, this article will grow over time.
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	16	= Mapping a specific URL location to a directory location on the system =
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6.1	18	Sometimes, you may want a very simple configuration where you have a specific URL location (i.e. https://transistor.one/bin/ ) and you want this URL prefix to indicate to Nginx to use a specific directory on the system to look for the requested files in. Or, in other words, every HTTP GET request sent to https://transistor.one/bin/ (e.g. https://transistor.one/bin/folder1/myfile.png ) to be searched for in a specific systems directory (e.g. /var/www/static/). This way, a request for https://transistor.one/bin/folder1/myfile.png should resolve to /var/www/static/folder1/myfile.png. How do we do this?
1.1	19
	20	Simple! We use the "alias" directive, like so!
	21
	22	{{code language="nginx"}}
	23	server {
6.1	24	server_name transistor.one;
1.1	25
	26	location /robots.txt {
	27	alias /var/www/static/robots.txt;
	28	}
	29
	30	location /sitemap.xml {
	31	alias /var/www/static/sitemap.xml;
	32	}
	33
	34	location /bin/ {
	35	alias /var/www/static/;
	36	}
	37
	38	location / {
6.1	39	return 301 https://alexandru.transistor.one$request_uri;
1.1	40	}
	41
	42	listen 80;
	43	listen [::]:80;
	44	listen 443 ssl;
	45	listen [::]:443;
	46	}
	47	{{/code}}
	48
	49	Please note that the most important part of that snippet is the location /bin/ directive, followed by the alias, which tells nginx to map all GET requests sent to the /bin/ URL to the /var/www/static directory.
	50
	51	The other directories above it (i.e. the location /robots.txt directive) also use the alias directive, but they use it to map to a specific file location, rather than a directory location. This is also possible.
3.1	52
	53	= Change maximum upload size that NGinx accepts =
	54
	55	Sometimes, you may wish to upload files to your server. And sometimes, those files may be quite large in size.
	56
	57	Nginx only allows uploads up to 1MB by default, which is very limited.
	58
	59	At least for certain servers, you may wish to increase this limit to a higher cap.
	60
	61	To do this, you must use the client_max_body_size directive, like so:
	62
	63	{{code language="nginx"}}
	64	server {
6.1	65	server_name wiki.transistor.one;
3.1	66
	67	listen [::]:443 ssl http2; # managed by Certbot
	68	listen 443 ssl http2; # managed by Certbot
	69
	70	client_max_body_size 2500M;
	71
	72	include /etc/nginx/snippets/ssl.conf;
	73
	74	location / {
	75	proxy_pass http://localhost:8081;
	76	}
	77	}
	78	{{/code}}
	79
6.1	80	Here, we set the maximum upload file size to 2.5GB (i.e. 2500 MB). Any upload size greater than this will be rejected for the wiki.transistor.one domain.
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