Foreword
Welcome to the 2020 edition of the NGINX Cookbook. O’Reilly has been publishing the NGINX Cookbook for almost five years, and a lot has changed. However, one thing hasn’t: every day, more and more of the world’s websites choose to run on NGINX. Today there are over 445 million, nearly double the number when the cookbook was first released—and millions more than when NGINX was first released.
Since I wrote the first version of NGINX in 2002, it’s grown to become the load balancer, web server, reverse proxy, and API gateway of choice for many websites and organizations—and it’s still growing. NGINX is a Swiss Army Knife: it can be used in almost any dataplane scenario, including as a content cache, web application firewall (WAF), and content delivery network (CDN). Not to mention the fact that it’s fast and reliable.
The NGINX Cookbook shows you how to get the most out of NGINX—whether NGINX Open Source or NGINX Plus. You’ll find over 170 pages of easy-to-follow recipes covering how to install NGINX, how to configure it for almost any use case, along with debugging and troubleshooting.
This version includes updates to many sections to cover new functionality in NGINX, as well as entirely new sections and chapters. With the introduction of NGINX App Protect, we’ve expanded on security in NGINX, along with the expanded NGINX Controller coverage in parallel to the stunning new features introduced to NGINX Controller in 2020 (with more to come).
I hope you enjoy the NGINX Cookbook, and that it contributes to your success creating and deploying applications with NGINX—fulfilling the vision I had all those years ago.