Why nginx?

Coming from a PHP background, one of the concepts that was difficult for me to grasp was Rails’ lack of the out-of-the-box server functionality seen in PHP. With PHP, if it is installed, you can open a shell and type the following:

php -S localhost:9000

This will bring up an internal PHP server. You can now open a browser, point it to http://localhost:9000/, and that’s all you need to do. Any PHP scripts we add to the same folder where we started the PHP server will be available to said server. We don’t need any PHP framework to start programming in PHP. We can use this internal server for development and once we deploy our PHP application to a production server, our application just requires a web server that has PHP enabled. This is an oversimplification of how it’s actually done, but in essence, that’s all that’s needed for PHP servers.

In the good ol’ days, Apache was the way to go. These days, you can still use...