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ruby-on-railsnginxpuma

Why do I need Nginx with Puma?

I'm deploying a Rails app to production. It seems that Puma is fast and handles many of the things I want in a web server.

I'm wondering if I even need to bother with Nginx, and what I'd be missing out on if just used Puma?

Solution

  • Nginx is a web server and puma is an application server. Both have their advantages, and you need both.

    Some examples:

    • Static redirects- you could setup your nginx to redirect all http traffic to the same url with https. This way such trivial requests will never hit your app server.

    • Multipart upload- Nginx is better suited to handle multipart uploads. Nginx will combine all the requests and send it as a single file to puma.

    • Serving static assets- It is recommended to serve static assets (those in /public/ endpoint in rails) via a webserver without loading your app server.

    • There are some basic DDoS protections built-in in nginx.