Active Passive Load Balancer Configuration for Nginx

Here’s the configuration file that we ended up with testing an active passive configuration for our application using the software load balancer Nginx that I previously posted about.

worker_processes  1;
error_log  logs/error.log;
events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

####################################
#
#          loadbalancer
#         localhost:7777
#           /          \
#   webServerA         webServerB
# localhost:8080      localhost:8181
#    (active)           (passive)
#
####################################

http {
    include               mime.types;
    default_type          application/octet-stream;
    proxy_connect_timeout 2s;
    proxy_read_timeout    2s;

    sendfile              on;
    keepalive_timeout     65;

    upstream backend {
        server 127.0.0.1:8080     fail_timeout=1s max_fails=1;    # active node
        server 127.0.0.1:8181     backup;                         # passive node
    }

    server {
        listen                   7777;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            proxy_pass http://backend;
        }

        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }
    }
}