Category: nginx

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nginx SSL best practice including PFS and OCSP

nginx enables many additional features over Apache’s httpd server, which allows a much more secure SSL configuration, enabling features such as Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) which cannot be enabled using default Apache installs from repository.

Below is a guide on how to enable a very secure SSL configuration for your nginx server, including using Diffie–Hellman for key exchange, enabling Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) features and making use of higher security ciphers and protocols only.

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Adding nginx to the LAMP stack for performance

The Apache HTTP Server is a very flexible server that can be used with almost all open source projects with little to no customisation due to Apache’s ubiquity within the community, however being a jack of all trades unfortunately means it isn’t necessarily a master of everything. One of the more commonly cited issues with Apache HTTP, is that its resource usage is more considerable compared to other options available, which can lead to issues when under heavy load.

In order to obtain the benefits of lower resource usage, there are plenty of other options available such as the choice for this article of nginx as well as others such as Apache Traffic Server or lighttpd, however making use of these options as your server software of choice may lead to compatibility issues with your applications. To avoid any of these issues, this article outlines how to add nginx into the mix, without losing Apache.

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