Keeping in philosophy of KISS, nginx is an awesome, simple web server. It does few things and does it extremely well.
It doesn’t do CGI but does proxy’ing and that makes it extremely useful as a front end web server. I recently had to implement an extjs based progress bar for large file uploads with nginx acting as a front end to a Rack/mongrel based application. Here are the steps for ubuntu.

Do not install nginx from the repo. Uninstall if it’s already installed.

apt-get remove nginx

mkdir -p /opt/downloads
cd /opt/downloads

Download nginx sources from nginx.net and unpack (I’m working with nginx-0.6.36):

tar zxf nginx-0.6.36.tar.gz

Download an untar upload progress module from nginx wiki

tar zxf Nginx_uploadprogress_module-0.5.tar.gz
cd nginx-0.6.36
./configure --prefix=/opt/nginx --add-module=/opt/downloads/nginx_uploadprogress_module
make install

This’ll install nginx in /opt/nginx

Configuration

open up /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf and add following lines:

http {
     client_max_body_size 30M; # adjust as per your need
     upload_progress proxied 1m;
 
     server {
         server_name my.server.com;
         listen 80;
         root /var/www/nginx-default/my-static-files;
 
         location /ajax {
             proxy_pass http://localhost:2300;
             proxy_redirect default;
             track_uploads proxied 30s;
         }
         location ^~ /report_file_uploads {
              report_uploads proxied;
         }
     }
}

This assumes  ‘/ajax’ is the backend application proxy.

In Javascript, to get progress bar going, send following AJAX message in a loop, after the form with file upload field has been submitted.

Lots of details are omitted since these are dependent upon your javascript library of choice (which, btw, for us is extjs).

var upload_id = 'MyUniqueID'; // upload_id must be unique for each upload session
this.send_ajax_message({
       url: '/report_file_uploads',
       headers: {'X-Progress-ID' : upload_id},
       method:'GET',
       success: function(r) {
              r = this.parse_ajax_response(r);
             if(r.state == 'uploading' || r.state == 'starting') {
                var percent = (Number(r.received)/Number(r.size));
                if(percent > 1.0)
                    percent = 1.0;
                 //show percent as you wish on your progress meter
                 // sleep for few seconds and send this ajax message again
             } else if(r.state == 'done' || r.state == 'error') {
                // kill your loop timer
                // finish your progress meter
             }
        }
});

Let me know if you’d like javascript fragment for extjs and I’ll post it but it’s relatively straightforward.

At Yellowfish, we specialize in web2.0 Ajax web application development using open source tools and modern software trends.

The usual and perhaps recommended way to run wordpress behind nginx is via nginx and fast-cgi. You can easily find these articles on google. However, that’s quite a complex setup and it far easier to just run apache2 + php + wordpress behind nginx and use nginx as a proxy. It’s probably a waste of memory to run the monstrous apache along with nginx but it’s much simpler setup and between my time and computer memory, my time is far more expensive!

Just install wordpress following their usual instructions, then change the apache port to something other than 80 (since nginx is running on 80). Following example assumes apache running at 800.

Then, add following to your nginx conf:

server {
  listen   80;
  server_name  your.blogserver.com;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:800;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
  }
}

Restart your nginx and http://your.blogserver.com should now be your wordpress blog.

Pay special attention to proxy_set_header directive. It took me a while to figure out why wordpress was redirecting itself to ‘localhost’ !!!

Also, the apache config must have DirectoryIndex index.php set.