Enable Memcached Nginx Debian 9


Enable Memcached Nginx Debian 9

Memcached Basics

Memcached is a distributed memory caching system that greatly enhances the performance of network-based applications. It is a great tool that allows data to be stored and retrieved from a remote server. Memcached works by storing key-value pairs in memory, which allows data to be retrieved in constant time regardless of the amount of data stored.

Memcached is widely used in web applications that are deployed across multiple machines. Since the data is stored in RAM, it is much faster than a traditional database. Additionally, Memcached is extremely scalable, which makes it attractive to large web applications that need to store a large amount of data.

Installing Memcached on Debian 9

Memcached is included in the Debian 9 repositories, so it can be installed using the apt package manager. First, we need to update the local package index, and then install memcached:


$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install memcached

Once the installation is finished, it’s time to configure memcached. Open the memcached configuration file with your text editor:


$ sudo nano /etc/memcached.conf

We can configure the memory size and port number that memcached will use. By default, memcached will listen on port 11211, and it will use 64MB of RAM. We can change these settings in the following lines of the configuration file.


PORT="11211"
MEMUSAGE="64"

Once the configuration is complete, we can start the memcached service:


$ sudo systemctl start memcached

Enabling Memcached with Nginx

Now that we have memcached running on our server, we can enable it with Nginx. To do this, we need to add the following line to the Nginx configuration file, which is usually located in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.


server {
...
memcached_pass 127.0.0.1:11211;
..
}

By adding this line to the Nginx configuration, we are telling Nginx to use memcached running on the localhost server on port 11211. We can then add the following directives to tell Nginx which locations to cache:


location / {
proxy_cache memcached;
proxy_cache_key $uri$is_args$args;
}

This will enable Nginx to cache all requests to the specified location. We can then add other directives to specify the cache size, the cache timeout, and other options.

Testing the Memcached Installation with Nginx

We can test the memcached installation by using the curl utility. First, let’s make a GET request to an endpoint on our website, and check the response headers:


$ curl -I http://www.example.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Content-Type: text/html

Now, let’s make the same request but add the memcached-enabled header:


$ curl -I http://www.example.com --header "X-Memcache-Enabled: true"

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Content-Type: text/html
X-Memcache-Enabled: true

If we see the X-Memcache-Enabled header in the response, it means that Nginx is successfully using the memcached caching system.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve shown how to enable memcached caching with Nginx on a Debian 9 server. Memcached is an effective tool for improving the performance of web applications, and by combining it with Nginx we can get the most out of our server. We hope you’ve found this article useful.

FAQs

Q: How do I configure memcached on Debian 9?

A: You can configure memcached by editing the configuration file located at /etc/memcached.conf.

Q: How do I enable memcached with Nginx?

A: You can enable memcached with Nginx by adding the memcached_pass directive to your Nginx configuration file.

Q: How do I test the memcached installation with Nginx?

A: You can test the memcached installation by using the curl utility and adding the X-Memcache-Enabled header to the request.

Thank you for reading this article on how to enable memcached on Nginx Debian 9. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments section. Please also consider reading other articles on our website to learn more about web development.

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