In this broadcast, we’ll demonstrate how you can use NGINX Caching to speed up your websites. After the demonstration, Jason Nickerson will be taking your questions with cPanel NGINX Product Owner, Adam Wien.
Get started with NGINX Caching – Hosting Tutorials
NGINX caching is a powerful feature that can significantly improve the performance and scalability of your website or web application. Caching allows NGINX to store and serve frequently accessed content directly from memory, reducing the need to fetch the content from the backend servers for every request. This tutorial will guide you through the process of getting started with NGINX caching.
Step 1: Install NGINX First, make sure you have NGINX installed on your server. You can follow the official NGINX installation guide specific to your operating system to set up NGINX.
Step 2: Configure NGINX Caching Once NGINX is installed, you need to configure caching directives in your NGINX configuration file. This file is typically located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf or /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.
Within the http block of the configuration file, add the following lines to enable caching:
http {
# ...
proxy_cache_path /path/to/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=my_cache:10m max_size=10g inactive=60m;
proxy_temp_path /path/to/tmp;
# ...
}
In the above configuration, replace /path/to/cache with the path where you want to store the cached content, and /path/to/tmp with the path for temporary files.
Step 3: Configure Caching Directives for Your Content Next, you need to specify which content should be cached and for how long. Inside the server block or location block, add the following lines:
location / {
proxy_cache my_cache;
proxy_cache_valid 200 301 302 10m;
proxy_cache_valid 404 1m;
}
In the above configuration, proxy_cache my_cache; enables caching for the specified location. proxy_cache_valid sets the caching duration for specific response codes. Adjust the values according to your caching requirements.
Step 4: Test and Verify Caching After making the configuration changes, restart NGINX to apply the new settings. You can use the command sudo service nginx restart or sudo systemctl restart nginx depending on your operating system.
To test if caching is working, access your website or application and check the response headers using browser developer tools or tools like curl. Look for the X-Cache header, which indicates if the content was served from the cache or fetched from the backend.
Step 5: Monitor and Fine-tune Caching It’s important to monitor the effectiveness of your caching setup and make adjustments if necessary. NGINX provides various metrics and logging options to help you understand cache hit rates, cache efficiency, and other caching-related statistics. You can also configure cache purging to invalidate cached content when needed.
By implementing NGINX caching, you can greatly enhance the performance and speed of your website or application. Caching reduces the load on backend servers, improves response times, and enhances the overall user experience. With proper configuration and monitoring, NGINX caching can be a valuable tool in optimizing your web hosting infrastructure.
