What is Nginx?
Turkish: Nginx
Nginx is an event-driven web server that serves static content, proxies requests, and distributes traffic across backend servers.
What is Nginx?
Nginx is a web server and proxy software built around an event-driven architecture for handling many concurrent connections efficiently. It can serve static files, sit in front of application servers as a reverse proxy, and distribute traffic across multiple backends.
Compared with process- or thread-heavy models, Nginx focuses on handling many connections with a small number of workers. That makes it common for static content, API gateways, TLS termination, and load balancing.
What Nginx Does
- Static file serving: Delivers HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and downloads.
- Reverse proxy: Passes requests to Node.js, PHP-FPM, Python, or Java applications.
- Load balancing: Distributes traffic across more than one server.
- TLS termination: Handles HTTPS certificate work outside the application server.
- Caching and compression: Can cache responses and compress them with gzip or brotli.
Business Use
Nginx can be used for anything from a small corporate website to a high-traffic API platform. Placing it in front of the application server centralizes routing, security headers, rate limits, and logs instead of exposing the app directly to the internet.
Its reverse proxy and load balancer roles need careful configuration. Wrong timeouts, missing X-Forwarded-* headers, or unsafe cache rules can affect user sessions, IP logs, and whether users see fresh data.