Web gateway

Description

Installs services needed for a public facing web server.

Components

nginx

Interaction

Service users may invoke sudo /etc/init.d/nginx {reload,restart} to activate updated nginx configurations.

Configuration

Virtual hosts

We provide a basic nginx configuration, but do not define virtual hosts. Service users may create individual config files in /etc/nginx/local that will be included in a http context.

The file /etc/nginx/local/example-configuration may serve as a start. Copy this file to something like /etc/nginx/local/vhost.conf and edit it. You must at least:

  • replace www.example.com with the action virtual host name

  • adapt the proxy statements to match your application.

Anonymization

If you want IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) in nginx log files to be anonymized, use the log format “anonymized” by adding the following line inside your server declaration block:

access_log /var/log/nginx/${server_name}_access.log anonymized;

This way, only a /24 prefix for IPv4 addresses and a /48 prefix for IPv6 addresses will be logged.

nginx’ error log in /var/log/nginx/error.log can not be anonymized this way. You can, however, modify it’s log level (or turn off the error log completely) by overriding the error_log directive outside your server declaration block.

Performance logging

In addition to the normal access log files found in /var/log/nginx/site.access_log (common log format), nginx logs performance data for each request. There is a single log file /var/log/nginx/performance.log which has lines consisting of the following fields:

  • request time in ISO 8601 format

  • request identifier (see Request IDs below)

  • HTTP method

  • full URL in the form “SCHEME://HOST/URI*”

  • request status

  • length (bytes) of the response sent to the client

  • length (bytes) of the request received from the client

  • p if the request was pipelined, - otherwise

  • total request time (from receiving the first byte until sending the last byte)

  • comma-separated list of upstream request processing times (several items may be logged in case of upstream retries)

  • mod_gzip compression ratio or - if no compression took place.

Example log line:

2015-04-17T16:56:36+02:00 32990.1 GET "http://flyingcircus.io/@@/gocept.flyingcircus/js/jquery.min.js" 200 38667 922 . 0.8 "0.002, 0.006" 2.44

Example Pandas data import:

import pandas
performance = pandas.read_csv(
  'performance.log', sep=' ', quotechar='"', parse_dates=['timestamp'],
  na_values='-', names=('timestamp', 'id',
    'method', 'url', 'status', 'response_length', 'request_length', 'pipe',
    'request_time', 'upstream_times', 'gzip_ratio'))

Example PostgreSQL data import:

CREATE TABLE performance (
  timestamp          TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE,
  id                 VARCHAR(24),
  method             VARCHAR(10),
  url                TEXT,
  status             INT,
  response_length    INT,
  request_length     INT,
  pipe               CHAR(1),
  request_time       FLOAT,
  upstream_times     TEXT,
  gzip_ratio         FLOAT
);

COPY performance FROM 'performance.log' (FORMAT CSV, DELIMITER ' ',
   QUOTE '"', NULL '-');

Request IDs

nginx assigns each HTTP request a unique id. In the default configuration, the id gets logged to performance.log and passed to upstream servers in the X-Nginx-Id request header.

See /etc/nginx/nginx.conf for details. Users who configure their own proxy_set_header directives should be aware that they have to set this header on their own if needed.

Note

Request ids are not guaranteed to be unique forever. It is reasonable to assume that request ids will not repeat on the same host on the same day.

Monitoring

  • By default, the presence of nginx processes is checked.

  • To get checks for individual web pages (presence, specific content, response time), please notify the support.

Testing

To test your settings, e.g. to ensure you did not introduce some syntax error, you can use sudo /etc/init.d/nginx configtest.

mod_security

The open-source web application firewall mod_security is included on all web gateways. In the default configuration, however, it is inactive.

Configuration

To activate mod_security, enable it in a nginx configuration section (e.g., server or location):

ModSecurityEnabled on;
ModSecurityConfig /etc/nginx/modsecurity/modsecurity.conf;

This system-wide configuration file contains some useful defaults like activating the base rule set etc. Initially, mod_security runs in report-only mode. Additional configuration like switching to policing mode or including custom rule sets goes into /etc/nginx/modsecurity/local.conf. Service users can also put completely different mod_security configuration files into the /etc/nginx/modsecurity directory and use these in place of the default configuration file.

Log files

All mod_security events are logged into a directory hierarchy under /var/log/nginx/modsec_audit. Each event is written to a new file.

Log directories which are more than a day old are archived as tarballs under /var/log/nginx/modsec_audit_DATE.tar.xz and are subject to normal log retention.

AWStats

The system generates awstats configuration files automatically for every vhost configured in nginx. awstats configuration generally goes into /etc/awstats/vhosts.d and individual configuration files follow the naming convention awstats.VHOST.conf.

awstats configuration for individual vhosts can be augmented with custom configuration. Just put it into /etc/awstats/vhosts.d/local.VHOST.conf and it will be picked up during the next awstats run.

Application deployments may install configuration files for additional vhosts or replace the system-generated awstats configuration altogether. To do this, remove the system-generated configuration files (which belong to the awstats user) and replace them with files owned by an service user. Such files will not be touched by the automatic configuration update.

Web statistics generated on a VM can be accessed through the My Flying Circus dashboard.

By default, a list of all configured vhosts is presented. The presentation can be adjusted by creating /etc/awstats/pages.cfg. See the comments in /srv/www/localhost/cgi-bin/stats.cgi for details.