Hosting Plone and Zope 3 applications using nginx

nginx, zope3, zope2, Plone

I'm doing a setup on a new server, I've decided to replace the default Apache 2.2 with an nginx http server. The setup which is needed for Zope 3 and Plone applications is the following:

[buildout]
parts =
    nginx
    nginxctl

[nginx]
recipe = gocept.cmmi
url = http://sysoev.ru/nginx/nginx-0.7.6.tar.gz
md5sum = ae7ce6f66a2cf5a5970d9a9a0da0cf7d

[nginxctl]
recipe = gocept.nginx
hostname = localhost
port = 80
configuration =
    worker_processes 1;
    events {
        worker_connections 1024;
    }
    http {
            upstream z3 {
                server 127.0.0.1:8080;
            }
            upstream plone {
                server 127.0.0.1:9080;
            }
        server {
            listen      ${nginxctl:port};
            server_name z3.example.org;
            root html;
            include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf

            location / {
                proxy_pass http://z3/++lang++ro/++skin++myskin/mysite/++vh++http:z3.example.org:80/++/;
            }
        }
        server {
            server_name plone.example.org;
            include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf

            location / {
                proxy_pass http://plone/VirtualHostBase/http/plone.example.org:80/t1/VirtualHostRoot/;
            }
        }
        server {
            server_name plone.example.org;
            rewrite ^/(.*)  /VirtualHostBase/http/plone.example.org:80/t1/VirtualHostRoot/$1 last;
            location / {
                proxy_pass http://plone;
            }
        }
    }

Note: this is a buildout.cfg. Using it together with zc.buildout makes the nginx instalation a very simple process: install zc.buildout (easy_install zc.buildout), and then run buildout in the folder that contains the .cfg file.

The settings in proxy.conf are important. Without a valid proxy_temp_path, for some reason delivery of all content that came from a Plone 2.5 site that used CacheFu setup with no proxy cache was freezing at 16014 bytes. The paths in /var/nginx need to be created and set to be writable by the nginx process (user nobody in my case).

client_max_body_size            0;
client_body_buffer_size    128k;
client_body_temp_path      /var/nginx/client_body_temp;

proxy_connect_timeout      90;
proxy_send_timeout         90;
proxy_read_timeout         90;
proxy_buffer_size          4k;
proxy_buffers              4 32k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
proxy_temp_path            /var/nginx/proxy_temp;
proxy_redirect                  off;
proxy_set_header                Host $host;
proxy_set_header                X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header                X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

Resources

A more complete nginx sample configuration file (but that only covers how to configure Plone)

Grok guide on hosting Zope 3 with nginx (note, at this moment the document is wrong, the setup line is missing a slash at the end).