Welcome to HowToShipIt — practical how-to guides for developers: code, AI tools, and servers, explained step by step.
Session affinity used to cost money. Not any more. For years, the nginx sticky directive sat behind a paywall. If you wanted cookie-based session affinity — requests from one client consistently landing on the same backend server — you either paid for NGINX Plus or compiled a third-party module from source. Then, on 10 March … Read more
Your site was fine ten minutes ago. Now every page returns 502 Bad Gateway and your heart rate is doing the same thing as your error log. Take a breath: a 502 Bad Gateway on Nginx is one of the most debuggable errors in all of server land, because the error message is telling you … Read more
An Nginx reverse proxy for Node.js is the standard way to put a production Node app on the internet. Your Node app listens on a private port like 3000, and Nginx faces the world on ports 80 and 443, forwarding traffic inward. This setup gives you free SSL termination, fast static file serving, working WebSockets, … Read more