module-nginx/docs/quickstart.md

A QuickStart Guide to the NGINX Module

The goal of this module is to simplify the deployment and management of

Why NGINX?

Before going too far, make sure that the NGINX web server is appropriate for your needs. NGINX was designed to be a scalable web and proxy server with the abiilty to handle thousands of concurrent connections, but it is not designed to manage dynamic content. For dynamic web applications, NGINX must be configured to proxy connections to a different process. For example, a PHP application in the common "LAMP Stack" configuration with Apache and PHP only requires a few dynamic modules and configuration changes. Running the same application with an NGINX infrastructure requires the configuration of a NGINX proxy layer and a secondary runtime such as PHP-FPM. This can add complexity to setting up the infrastructure, but it does allow you to scale application layers independently. For a good comparison of how NGINX differs from Apache, DigitalOcean published a good article detailing some of the differences between the two.

NOTE: At this point, the module only supports Debian or RedHat based linux distributions.

Basic NGINX Installation and Configuration

Installing NGINX and setting up your first web host is relatively straightforward. To install NGINX with the puppet module, simply call the class in a puppet manifest:

   class{'nginx': }

This will install the NGINX package from the software repository of your Linux distribution, which can often be quite dated. If you would like to install NGINX from repositories maintained by the NGINX project directly, allow the nginx class to manage package repositories:

class{'nginx':
    manage_repo => true,
    package_source => 'nginx-mainline'
}

The choices here are nginx-stable (the current 'production' level release) and nginx-mainline (where active development is occuring) - you can read a full explanation of the differences here.

Creating Your First Virtual Host

Calling the nginx class from your manifest simply installs the NGINX software and puts some basic configuration in place. In this state, NGINX will not serve web pages or proxy to other services - for that, we need to define a server. In NGINX terminology, a server is how we define our services (such as websites) with a name. (If you are used to configuring Apache, a server is identical to an Apache virtual host.) A simple virtual host that serves static web pages can be defined with a server name and a web root, or the directory where our HTML pages are located.

  nginx::resource::vhost{'www.myhost.com':
    www_root => '/opt/html/',
  }

In this example, the DNS address www.myhost.com will serve pages from the /opt/html directory.

Defining