about the Guide to Nginx Module Development

[Manlio Perillo]

Evan Miller ha scritto:
> Manlio Perillo wrote:
>> Hi again.
>>
>> I have decided to write mod_wsgi by myself, and I have fuond the Evan 
>> Miller's guide very helful.
> 
> Glad it was useful. I'll try to keep updating it with more info, but in 
> the meantime I thought I'd try to answer your specific questions (below).
> 
>>
>> However I think that some important documentation is missing:
>> 1) The overall architecture of nginx
>> 2) nginx memory handling
> 
> Nginx has a pool of memory associated with each request (r->pool), which 
> is reclaimed at the end of the request. You can malloc memory with 
> ngx_palloc(r->pool, BYTES). I'm not sure whether you can free memory 
> allocated in this way manually.
> 

Ok.
I'm using the pool also for allocating memory for the 
configuration_object (main e location), since I need to convert from 
ngx_str_t to null terminating strings.

>> 3) how to read data from the request payload
> 
> I'm not sure, actually; but check out 
> http://www.riceonfire.org/lxr/http/source/http/ngx_http_request_body.c
> 

If I'm right, when calling a "normal" request handler, the entire 
request body has been read by nginx, and stored in a temporary file or 
in internal buffers.

However I do not understand this:
"""If the request body is more than the buffer, then the entire request 
body or some part is written in a temporary file."""

Does nginx use only one buffer?
Does really nginx write a part of the request body in the buffer and a 
part on a temporary file?

The question is simple:
- if the entire request body is in a file, I can pass to the WSGI
   application a File object.
- if the entire request body is in one buffer, I can pass to the WSGI
   application a StringIO object

If this is possible, I can keep the code as simple as possible!

>> 4) how to read and generate arbitrary headers
>>    There is an headers attribute in the request struct, what is its
>>    content?
>

I have done some test, and this is not very hard.
The "hard" part is that some headers must be "parsed" and stored in 
special attributes of the request object.

> 
> [...]
 >
>> 5) More about chain links.
>>    When sending the response body, we have two choices
>>    (but I'm not sure):
>>    - write the entire chain links and then pass it to the output filter
>>      (so we buffer the entire response)
>>    - create a partial response, create a buffer and call the output
>>      filter, then create a new partial response, create a new buffer and
>>      call the outputfilter, and so on.
> 
> I believe that's correct.
> 

The question here is: when I call the output filter function without 
return from the handler function, does nginx try to send the data to the 
client?
Does nginx run a "main loop" cycle?

> When I research these issues more I'll add them to the guide.
> 
> Good luck with mod_wsgi! I know it's a module a lot of people would find 
> useful.
> 

Thanks!
I'm writing mod_wsgi with one design goal in mind: to be able to use 
nginx as a small and robust server to serve WSGI applications.

nginx is not Apache and mod_wsgi is not a general purpose module: it 
must be used to serve only one WSGI application with one nginx server.

> Evan
> 


P.S.
The nginx code is really good!



Regards   Manlio Perillo