Nginx High-Performance Reverse Proxy AI Skill Guide (Claude)

Overview & Engine Architecture

Nginx terminates HTTP/TLS, serves static assets, and reverse-proxies to upstream apps using an event-driven worker model. Master parses config and binds ports; workers handle connections with keepalive pools to backends. In Docker/Kubernetes, upstream hostnames resolve at config parse time unless you use resolver + variable proxy_pass—the most common production footgun.