Grok, Virtual Hosting and Nginx
===============================

:Author: Sebastian Ware

Configuring the super fast and lightweight Nginx HTTP server to support virtual hosting.

Zope 3 and thus Grok supports virtual hosting straight out of the box. The super fast and lightweight Nginx HTTP server does this too. In fact, it is so easy to congfigure even a caveman could do it... so I did.

This is a stripped down version of [nginx.conf] with only the relevant statements included. Add these in the appropriate places to the default nginx.conf and you will be cooking in no time.

.. code-block:: c++
   :linenos:

   http {
     upstream mygrokinstance {
       server 127.0.0.1:8080;
     }
     server {
       listen       80;
       server_name  www.example.com;
       location / {
         proxy_pass http://mygrokinstance/grok_application_name/++vh++http:www.example.com:80/++;
       }		
     }
   }

**Explanation:**

**2-4:**
   Defining a backend server `mygrokinstance`. This also allows me to add simple 
   load-balancing (round-robin and client IP) by adding an extra line for each server.
	
**5-11:**
   Server directives...
	
**6:**
   The port that Nginx listens to.
	
**7:**
   The domain name used to access the application.
	
**8-10:**
   The rewrite rule.
	
**8:**
   ``location /`` corresponds to anything. ``location  /application`` would equal anything 
   starting with ``www.example.com/application``
	
**9:**
   The rewrite rule, where:
	
     ``mygrokinstance`` is the backend server that we defined on row 3-5

     ``grok_application_name/`` is the application name since I don't want to have to 
     include it in the URLs

     ``http:www.example.com:80/`` tells zope to generate the URLs without the application name


More on Nginx:

  http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main

Virtual hosting in Zope 3:

  http://wiki.zope.org/zope3/virtualhosting.html

The Nginx upstream command:

  http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxHttpUpstreamModule