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Posted in Linux, PHP

I’ve been looking for ways to speed up my site recently and came across this interesting article on seamlessly integrating nginx with Apache to handle asset files without requiring a CDN subdomain. This works by checking the requests file extension for .js, .jpg, .pdf etc and if not found, proxies the request to Apache and serves the results.

Benefits

You won’t need to modify all your pages/posts updating asset locations to point to a subdomain! Everything will ‘just work’.

Issues/Drawbacks

There are 2 issues I’ve found with this setup:

  • Because Apache is now running on port 8080, your mod_rewrite redirects will now redirect to that port. You won’t be able to use RedirectMatch anymore, however below is the solution I came up with: 
    sudo apt-get install nginx
sudo nano/etc/nginx/sites-available/default
  • You can no longer use .htaccess redirects for any asset files nginx is serving. Instead, use nginx redirects. Below is an example: 
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    # You may add here your
# server {
#	...
# }
# statements for each of your virtual hosts
 
server {
 
	listen   80; ## listen for ipv4
	listen   [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
 
	server_name  localhost;
	root /var/www/; 
	access_log  /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log;
 
	# Static Contents
	location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {		access_log off;
		expires 30d;
	}
 
	# Dydamic Content forward to Apache
	location / {
        	proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
	        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        	proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
	        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;	}
}
 
###############################################################################
# virtualhost
###############################################################################
 
#server {
#    server_name www.example.com example.com;
#    root /var/www/example.com/html/;
#
#    # Static Contents
#    location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {
#        access_log off;
#        expires 30d;
#    }
#
#    # Dydamic Content forward to Apache
#    location / {
#        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
#        proxy_set_header Host $host;
#        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
#        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
#    }
#}

    For more information on nginx redirects, see the official documentation.

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