Web server vs application server in Nginx - Hands-On Comparison

Understanding Web Server vs Application Server with Nginx

📖 Scenario: You are setting up a simple web environment to understand how a web server and an application server work together. You will configure Nginx as a web server to serve static files and forward dynamic requests to an application server.

🎯 Goal: Build a basic Nginx configuration that serves static HTML files and proxies requests for dynamic content to an application server running on port 8080.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a basic Nginx server block to serve static files from /var/www/html

Add a configuration variable for the application server address http://127.0.0.1:8080

Configure Nginx to proxy requests starting with /app/ to the application server

Print the final Nginx configuration to verify the setup

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Web servers like Nginx serve static content and forward dynamic requests to application servers, which run the application logic. This separation improves performance and scalability.

💼 Career

Understanding how to configure web servers and application servers is essential for DevOps roles, system administrators, and backend engineers to deploy and manage web applications efficiently.

1

Create basic Nginx server block for static files

Write the Nginx server block configuration to listen on port 80 and serve static files from /var/www/html using the root directive.

Nginx

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use listen 80; to listen on HTTP port and root /var/www/html; to serve static files.

2

Add application server address variable

Add a variable set $app_server http://127.0.0.1:8080; inside the server block to define the application server address.

Nginx

server {
    listen 80;
    root /var/www/html;
    index index.html;

    # Define application server address
    # Your code here

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use the set directive inside the server block to create the variable.

3

Configure proxy for application server requests

Add a location /app/ block inside the server block that proxies requests to the application server using proxy_pass $app_server;.

Nginx

server {
    listen 80;
    root /var/www/html;
    index index.html;

    set $app_server http://127.0.0.1:8080;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    # Add proxy location for /app/
    # Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use location /app/ { proxy_pass $app_server; } to forward requests to the app server.

4

Print the final Nginx configuration

Print the entire Nginx configuration stored in the variable nginx_config to verify the setup.

Nginx

# Print the Nginx configuration
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(nginx_config) to display the configuration.