Nginx – Using SAML authentication within nginx

1. Yes you can use your nginx install. You don't need to proxy at all, just continue using passenger with nginx and have nginx server static content direct

2. Popular opinion is probably, if you had Apache or Squid running you might consider using them, but since you have nginx already, nginx is a great choice. Avoiding using passenger to serve static files may offer significant performance gains - but of course you milage will vary.

3. Same server/slice probably fine, if your traffic was so large that it had an impact, sure move it to another server, but there is no reason to proxy it, just change the urls accordingly - this is what serverfault does.

An example config file would be:

server {
listen www.example.com:80;

server_name  www.example.com;

    location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|css|bmp|js|ico|swf)$ {
       root  /home/static/files;
       expires 7d;
    }

    location / {
       root /home/rails_app;
       passenger_enabled on;
    }     

}

Obviously add any additional files types as necessary.

There is a http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSubModule - "This module can search and replace text in the nginx response."

copy past from docs:

Syntax:

sub_filter string replacement

Example:

location / {
  sub_filter      </head>
  '</head><script language="javascript" src="$script"></script>';
  sub_filter_once on;
}