A Comprehensive Guide to Nginx for Developers

👋 This is my first blog post on dev.to . I hope you enjoy it. ⚡ Nginx is a high-performance, event-driven, lightweight web server and reverse proxy. Thanks to its asynchronous and non-blocking architecture, it can handle a large number of concurrent connections with very low resource usage. Besides serving static assets efficiently, Nginx can route requests to backend services via proxy_pass and supports multiple load-balancing algorithms, such as round-robin, least connections, and IP hash. It is also commonly used for SSL termination, caching, separating static and dynamic traffic, and basic security hardening, which makes it a key traffic gateway in modern microservice and front-end/back-end separated architectures. Basic Configuration http vs server vs location Context What it does Example http Global HTTP-level settings (timeouts, logs, compression, cache, etc.) http { proxy_read_timeout 300s; gzip on; } server A virtual host (a “site”/service). Binds listen and server_name server