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trimstray/nginx-admins-handbook
How to improve NGINX performance, security, and other important things.
A reference handbook for nginx configuration covering performance tuning, TLS hardening, and reverse proxy setup. It's aimed at sysadmins and backend engineers who configure nginx in production and want a single place to look up rules, gotchas, and working config snippets rather than re-reading the official docs.
The TLS/SSL section is genuinely thorough — it covers cipher suite selection, OCSP stapling, DH parameter sizing, and HSTS with concrete nginx directives rather than hand-waving. The rules are organized by concern (base, debugging, performance, hardening, reverse proxy) with rationale for each, not just a list of directives to copy. The included config snippets in lib/nginx/ are structured in a sensible modular layout that you could actually deploy. The printable TLS hardening cheatsheets are a nice offline reference for the 'what cipher suites do I set' question that comes up repeatedly.
Last updated November 2024 but the content reads like it was written for nginx 1.x circa 2020 — HTTP/3 and QUIC get a brief mention without any configuration guidance, which is a real gap now that nginx 1.25+ ships QUIC support natively. The installer script (ngx_installer.sh) builds from source against CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 18.04, both EOL, making the 'fully automatic installation' section actively misleading for anyone starting fresh. The documentation is all prose and config snippets with no automated tests; there's no way to verify the example configs still parse correctly against current nginx versions, and some directives have changed defaults across versions without the handbook being updated.