Installing and Configuring HTTP Modules

In this chapter, we will explore the installation and configuration of standard

HTTP
modules. Standard HTTP modules are built into Nginx by default unless you disabl
e
them while running the configure script. The optional HTTP modules are only
installed if you specify them explicitly while running configure. These modules
deal
with functionalities such as SSL, HTTP authentication, HTTP proxy, gzip compress
ion,
and many others. We will look at some optional HTTP modules in the next chapter.
All the configuration directives we have talked about so far and the ones that w
e will
be discussing in this and the remaining chapters are specified in the nginx.conf
file.
The default location of this file is /usr/local/conf/nginx.conf.
Standard HTTP modules
As mentioned earlier, standard HTTP modules are built into Nginx by default unle
ss
you explicitly disable them. As the name suggests, these modules provide standar
d
HTTP functionality to the web server. We will now have a look at some of the
important standard HTTP modules.
The core module (HttpCoreModule)
The core module deals with the core HTTP features. This includes the protocol ve
rsion,
HTTP keepalive, location (different configurations based on URI), documents' roo
ts,
and so on. There are over 74 configuration directives and over 30 environment va
riables
related to the HTTP Core module. We will discuss the most important ones briefly
.