Nginx – How to determine which request nginx sends to a proxy and which it serves

loggingnginx

I currently have nginx proxying for Thin, but set up to serve static files for the app that Thin is serving instead of proxying the request.

What I'd like to know is how I can check that the rules are set up correctly. Since Thin doesn't log requests, I would need to set up nginx logs in such a way that it shows which requests were served as files and which were passed to Thin. Is this even possible? If so, how?

Best Answer

Depending on your configuration, it may be easy to achieve. Here is my solution...

server {
  server_name domainname.com;
  root /path/to/files;
  # index index.php index.html;

  # logging of all requests in access.log
  access_log /some/path/such/as/var/log/nginx/access.log;

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri @thin;
  }

  location @thin {
    # pass the requests to thin
    # proxy_pass http://thin;

    # proxy specific logging in proxy-access.log
    access_log /some/path/such/as/var/log/nginx/proxy-access.log;
  }
}

Hope this helps!

Related Solutions

Nginx – How to Set Up as a Caching Reverse Proxy

I don't think that there is a way to explicitly invalidate cached items, but here is an example of how to do the rest. Update: As mentioned by Piotr in another answer, there is a cache purge module that you can use. You can also force a refresh of a cached item using nginx's proxy_cache_bypass - see Cherian's answer for more information.

In this configuration, items that aren't cached will be retrieved from example.net and stored. The cached versions will be served up to future clients until they are no longer valid (60 minutes).

Your Cache-Control and Expires HTTP headers will be honored, so if you want to explicitly set an expiration date, you can do that by setting the correct headers in whatever you are proxying to.

There are lots of parameters that you can tune - see the nginx Proxy module documentation for more information about all of this including details on the meaning of the different settings/parameters: http://nginx.org/r/proxy_cache_path

http {
  proxy_cache_path  /var/www/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=my-cache:8m max_size=1000m inactive=600m;
  proxy_temp_path /var/www/cache/tmp; 


  server {
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://example.net;
      proxy_cache my-cache;
      proxy_cache_valid  200 302  60m;
      proxy_cache_valid  404      1m;
    }
  }
}

Nginx Windows Proxy Cache server static content

Are you sure you want nginx on windows? from http://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html:

Version of nginx for Windows uses the native Win32 API (not the Cygwin emulation layer). Only the select() connection processing method is currently used, so high performance and scalability should not be expected. Due to this and some other known issues version of nginx for Windows is considered to be a beta version.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Nginx – How to Set Up as a Caching Reverse Proxy

Nginx Windows Proxy Cache server static content

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