AGORA GAMES

It’s no secret that Agorian systems folk favor NGINX for our web serving needs. We’ve written about it a lot before. Therefore, it should be no surprise that we end up making a lot of things designed to work on Apache work on NGINX. (We’ve also written about that before, come to think of it…)

One example is vBulletin. A number of Agora’s sites are powered by the forum software, which comes with rewriting rules for Apache’s mod_rewrite and IIS… but not NGINX.

So, if you’re interested in setting up vBulletin behind NGINX (and are using the advanced URL rewriting, like we are), you can find a sample configuration for doing so here.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Those of you in the Rails community who use NGINX may have come across this before: Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s NGINX config. It bears some similarity to the ones we use at Agora. Specifically, the section relating to serving page-cached files. The relevant lines (pulled from one of our configs) looks like this:

if (-f $request_filename.html) { rewrite (.*) $1.html break; }
if (-f $request_filename/index.html) { rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break; }
if (!-f $request_filename) { proxy_pass http://some-proxy; }

This generally works well, for simple cases. Unfortunately, we’ve run into some more complex ones where it didn’t cut it. I’ll outline two of those cases below and show what we did to fix it.

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NGINX supports WebDAV, but its support is incomplete. Here’s how we made a quick PHP hack to allow us to use WebDAV without having to proxy to another web server.

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