It’s neither comprehensive nor definitive but it will certainly help you get started

Contents

Why openresty?

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Before we answer the why let us first deal with the what.

“What is openresty?“

Openresty is a packaging of nginx together with various useful libraries that can be used to write application servers. Notice the emphasis on write. Now you will not be limited to just configuring your server but you can program it. At it’s core it’s still the nginx that you know. All your configuration files that work with vanilla nginx will work with openresty. When you install openresty you lose nothing. But you gain:-

An ability to script nginx with an easy to use language, lua. Do things that were impossible or difficult with nginx configuration files before.

With that out of the way.. why would you want to learn about open resty at all? Aren’t there enough web frameworks already? Do you need to learn yet another one?

Fair questions. Nginx does web applications really really well. It is light, it is fast and it is very well documented. People have often reported that just by configuring nginx to serve their applications they have gained a boost in performance. That nginx makes your applications fast is a well accepted fact. What openresty does is that it takes all the goodness of nginx : it’s fast response time and it’s low memory usage and removes the barriers to developing applications with it.

“And what are these barriers?“

The configuration files themselves. While they are quite flexible all they do is they limit the power of nginx to the set that is configurable. Sure you can do a lot but not anything beyond what is allowed. Here is a simple example for instance

Suppose before forwarding the data POSTed to your application you want to do certain checks on the data so that you can be sure that your application receives only the clean refined data to operate upon. Is there any easy way to validate the data posted to nginx before it is forwarded to your application server? If there is I could not find it. But in open resty this is as simple as

content_by_lua ' -- read the request of the body ngx.req.read_body() -- give back the body as an easily query-able table data structure local post_args = ngx.req.get_post_args() -- validate the data local clean_body_data = require("lib/validate").validate_body(post_args) '

This has the effect of simplifying your architecture by guaranteeing that any data that is posted by the proxy is valid. So your application layer can focus on working upon it without worrying about cleansing it first. Once you learn open resty you will be able to identify many such functions that can be better delegated to a proxy. It will simplify your application and allow you to use nginx and all it’s low resource, fast performance goodness to the fullest. Win win.

“But my application is working. I don’t want to change any thing“

I am not asking you to change. Remember that openresty is still nginx. Everything that was working will continue to work. Openresty just gives you an opportunity to make use of nginx in ways that you might not have considered before. You have nothing to loose and much to gain.

If you are still not convinced check out this Top ten things about openresty post to get a quick idea of what all you’ll be able to do with it once you’ve put in the effort of learning it.

What do you need to start learning open resty?

You need to know lua. BUT BEFORE YOU CLOSE THIS TAB know that you don’t need to have a mastery of the language to start developing openresty applications. All you need is 15 minutes worth of lua and you are all set to go. More specifically you need to have a solid understanding of lua tables, lua modules, how to write loops and conditional statements and the variable scope in lua. If you have programmed before you can learn all of this before you finish your first cup of coffee 🙂

But wait I don’t know any nginx

Not a problem. Nginx applications are written in what are known as configuration files. You can get most of it by just reading but if you encounter any problem the nginx website has a very detailed documentation and tonnes of community support so you should be able to google your way out of any trouble. The entire guide is written with the assumption that

You have no knowledge of nginx You can work with the command line: copy paste the code, run programs etc Read the manual in case you need more detailed information.

All you need therefore to follow this guide is willingness to learn.

Hello world

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In case you skipped the introduction and jumped to the hello world then first of all good for you! and second a summary of what I said above:-

Openresty is just an enhancement of nginx. So all your previous knowledge of nginx carries over.

This is a hello_world example to illustrate how to write openresty scripts. The first thing that we will do is we will create a file structure for our config files and scripts. Here is a high level overview

root -logs -conf

All the nginx configuration files go within the conf folder and all the logging goes in the logs folder. Easy right? This structure will not only do for our simple demonstration here but will also hold well for complex examples that we will work on later. Let us examine the configuration file for the hello_world example

worker_processes 1; error_log logs/error.log; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { server { listen 8080; location / { default_type text/html; content_by_lua ' ngx.say("<p>hello, world</p>") '; } } }

This will look very familiar to you if you have used nginx. The only thing that is new in this file is the content_by_lua statement. This statement executes the lua code that within the '' string. The nginx api is provided to lua in the form of a standard package ngx . Well there are in fact two packages ngx and ndk but we will focus on ngx for now as we can get far with just that. What ngx.say() does is that it sends the concatenated arguments to the client as an http response. But enough talk for now. Let us run this example:-

nginx -p `pwd` -c conf/nginx.conf

Here pwd is the path with directory of your configuration file

and then

curl http://localhost:8080/

you should see a response

<p>hello world</p>

And congratulations you have written you first openresty script. Now I don’t know about you but wrapping code scripts around strings does not look pretty to me. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could create a separate file for lua scripts and include it in the nginx configuration files? content_by_lua_file allows us to do just that. Let us create a separate directory lua

mkdir lua

And now create a lua file called hello_world.lua containing just one line of code

ngx.say("<p>Hello world from a lua file</p>");

Now we will create another location block in the nginx.conf file that will use content_by_lua_file instead of content_by_lua . Here is what the final configuration looks like

worker_processes 1; error_log logs/error.log; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { server { listen 8080; location / { default_type text/html; content_by_lua ' ngx.say("<p>hello, world</p>") '; } location /by_file { default_type text/html; content_by_lua_file ./lua/hello_world.lua; } } }

Before we curl for the /by_file location we must reload nginx

nginx -p pwd -s reload

now curl http://localhost:8080/by_file should return

<p>hello world from lua</p>

Some notes

The directory structure that we used in this example is just a suggestion. It has no bearing whatsoever on writing lua scripts. If you have a pretty big lua application it is likely that your code will be divided into specific scripts that execute as directive handlers (like the content_by_lua script that we wrote above) and generic modules that will be used across many handlers (like say an authentication module that will be run across multiple content_by_lua handlers) Openresty follows the lua module system. So you can easily package a repeatable unit of code in a file and require() the file and use it’s functions. We discuss more on this in the organizing your lua code section. If you’d like to quickly create a barebones openresty application (with sensible defaults) that lets you see how nginx configuration and lua files work together check out the command line tool restyskeleton.

Directives

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Nginx comes with it’s own mini programming language in which directives form the basic constructs. These directives are either block level or simple. Simple directives are structured as the name of the directive and the name of the parameters. The directive name and the parameters are separated by a space and the end of the directive is marked by a ; . The block level directives are similar in with the only difference being it is marked by { and } brackets. Within a block level directive there could be one or more simple directives. These directives make up the configuration files. Time for an example:-

#location is a block level directive location /{ #proxy_pass is a simple directive proxy_pass http://localhost:5984/; }

Openresty keeps the same structuring of the configuration files. You still create configuration files with simple and block level directives. Any nginx directive works with openresty in the same way as it would in a vanilla nginx application. However a new set of directives are introduced by openresty that serve as the entry point to the lua code.

Openresty’s directives

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Openresty’s directives serve as the entry point for execution of lua code.

As we saw in the last chapter there is little difference between a vanilla nginx configuration and an nginx_lua configuration. In fact almost all of the nginx directives can be used as usual in an nginx_lua configuration file. However openresty adds several new directives that enhances the configurability of nginx. We already looked at content_by_lua and content_by_lua_file . Here we will take a look at a few more interesting ones

lua_code_cache

This directive turns the caching of lua modules on or off. By default the

the caching is turned on so that the lua modules are loaded once and then just reused. This is a desirable effect as we would not want to reload modules on every request. So when would you want to turn the caching off? During the development phase. It can be a pain to edit the configuration file, save it and then do an nginx -s reload over and over again. When caching is turned off the module is reloaded on every request so you can just edit, save your file and then “refresh” the browser to see the changes. Just be sure to turn the lua_code_cache on again in production.

Let us test this by turning lua_code_cache off in our hello world example. After the changes our configuration file should look something like this.

worker_processes 1; error_log /dev/stderr; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { server { listen 8080; location /by_file { default_type text/html; lua_code_cache off; #only for development content_by_lua_file ./lua/hello_world.lua; #update it with path to your lua file } } }

Now lets run this by

nginx -p 'pwd' -c conf/nginx.conf

You should see an alert message displayed on your console

lua_code_cache is off; this will hurt performance in ./directives/conf/nginx.conf

Disregard the message for now. But keep in mind to turn on the code cache in production.

Then curl http://localhost:8080/

you should see

hello world

in response

Now edit the hello_world.lua to

ngx.say("<b>hello world</b>");

and on curl http://localhost:8080/ you should see the response

<b>hello world</b>

This makes our work flow of developing ngx_lua applications much smoother.

Note as you might have already guessed lua_code_cache works only for *by_lua_file directives. It will have no effect upon *by_lua directives.

nginx block level rules apply to the lua_code_cache directive. Which means if you set lua_code_cache off in a top level directive all the other lower lever directives will pick up on this configuration. Similarly you can achieve isolation for particular directives by turning the caching off only for those directives.

Also any changes you make to the nginx.conf file itself won’t be detected automatically by nginx. And you will have to reload the server manually. This automatic reload works only for lua files.

init_by_lua

init_by_lua directive runs the lua code specified by the parameter string on a global level. As the name probably suggests the init_by_lua runs the lua code as nginx is initializing (loading the configuration files). As a result we can declare parameters here that will be used by directives in the configuration files after they are loaded. Thus init_by_lua is useful when you want to register lua global variables or start lua modules during the nginx server start up.

Before we take a look at the example of init_by_lua a friendly warning.

As a general principle refrain from using lua global variables. For most variables you should use a local keyword to declare lua variables local to it’s scope. And remember any variable declared without a local keyword is global in lua.

local cat = "meow" -- use this form most of the time dog = "woof" -- avoid this form except for when it makes sense

Why refrain from using global variables?

Openresty is based on the principle of request isolation. Any request that goes to a location block say location /one{} is independent from the request that goes to the location /two{} . Every request handler has it’s own set of global variables that are deleted at the end of the request cycle. This means that if you declare a variable as global in a location block that global variable will be inaccessible from another location block. Since as we discussed above each location block has it’s own set of global variables that are isolated from each other.

When does it make sense to use global variables?

Suppose you want to use a module that parses JSON which will be used

in many handlers, or a database client that will be used in many handlers or any other module that will be used across many handlers then it makes sense to declare the variable global and even then init_by_lua should be the only place where you do it.

An example to illustrate the difference b/w local and global variables

init_by_lua

init_by_lua ' cjson = require("cjson") -- cjson is a global variable '

location /one { content_by_lua ' local validate = require("lua/validate") -- validate is a local variable decoded_one = cjson.decode({hello="world"}) --decoded_one is a global variable ' } location /two{ content_by_lua ' ngx.say(cjson.encode(decoded_one)) ' }

In the example above we have two global variables. The first one cjson in the init_by_lua is a true global variable. One that can be accessed across request handlers. The second global variable (decoded_one) that we declare in the location /one block is global only in the context of /one if we try to access this in the /two block we get a nil value. Besides having unexpected effects,that are hard to debug, global variables have performance penalties of being looked up from a global table. Conclusion: global variables are to be used sparingly for things we want to be truly global. init_by_lua should be the only place to declare them.

init_by_lua has a variant in init_by_lua_file where you can supply a file containing the lua code that will be run in a global context. Everything that we talked about in init_by_lua also applies to init_by_lua_file .

location /json{ content_by_lua ' ngx.say(cjson.encode({message="hello world",another_message="goodbye world"})); '; }

In the location block above we are using cjson global variable that was declared in an init_by_lua_file to encode lua tables in json. cjson was a good contender for the global variable declaration because we are going to be using it in many location blocks.

set_by_lua

set_by_lua directive is equivalent to nginx’s set commands.

Quite predictably set is used in nginx to ‘set’ the value for a variable.

Similarly set_by_lua allows you to set a variable by evaluating a lua code string.

Once more set_by_lua has a _file alternative in set_by_lua_file that allows you to set a variable by executing the code in lua file.

Note set_by_lua blocks the nginx’s event loop during it’s execution therefore long time consuming code sequences are best avoided here.

So while a few arithmetic computations are fine loops should be avoided.

set_by_lua works well with nginx’s set command so the two can be used interchangeably. The directives will run in the order in which they appear in the code.

location /set_by_lua{ set $nvar 20; set_by_lua $lvar 'return ngx.var.nvar+1'; echo "$nvar,$lvar"; }

content_by_lua

We already discussed this directive in the hello_ world chapter. But now that we have more understanding of how the directives work we can see content_by_lua in a different light.

Unlike the set_by_lua command that blocks the nginx’s event loop content_by_lua directive runs in it’s own spawned coroutine. Which means that it does not block the nginx’s event loop and runs in a separate environment. content_by_lua is a special class of directive called content handlers. They execute only in the context of location directive (which if you recall our discussion at the beginning of this chapter is a block level directive).

Anyway, the location directive captures the request for a matching url and then leaves it to the content handler to service the request. For instance

location /me { root /data/me; }

if a request is made to /me handle the content in /data/me would be served. A location block should have only one content handler. Do not mix nginx’s default content handlers like proxy_pass or directory mappers with ngx_lua’s content_by_lua.

The content_by_lua directive can execute lua code that is contained within it. For ex:

location /test{ content_by_lua ' local is_test = ngx.req.get_uri_args()["test"] '; }

The above content_by_lua directive executes a single line of lua code which just stores the value of query string parameter called test in a local variable called is_test.

And yeah there is a content_by_lua_file 🙂

rewrite_by_lua

ngnx_lua equivalent of nginx’s HttpRewriteModule. Like the content_by_lua directive rewrite_by_lua runs in a spawned coroutine. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the directive always runs after the standard http_rewrite_module . So if you are using both keep that in mind.

The purpose of rewrite_by_lua is to lua-fy the nginx rewrite phase which is basically used to:-

change request URI using regular expressions, return redirects, and conditionally select configurations.

rewrite_by_lua can make api calls (we will see how to make api calls in the next chapter). So you can issue dynamic rewrites based on the response returned from your database etc.

About rewrite_by_lua_file : …..

It’s same as rewrite_by_lua except that it executes lua code from a file.

access_by_lua

ngx_lua equivalent of HttpAccessModule

Two points to note here

It runs in a separate coroutine. It runs after the standard nginx http_access module so if you are mixing the two keep that in mind.

Like rewrite_by_lua it can make api calls. And yes there is a access_by_lua_file

By now you have probably understood what lua directives are and how they work. There are a few more directives.Some of them are utilities and some for tweaking the ngx_lua behaviour. The important points to take away from this chapter are

The *by_lua modules that tweak the nginx behaviour (for ex the rewrite_by_lua that is the lua equivalent of nginx http rewrite) module are always run after the standard nginx modules. The choice of *by_lua module to use largely depends upon the problem that you are trying to solve. For example the init_by_lua module is used for initialization operations where as access_by_lua may be used to implement access policies for a location block. Personally among the various directives I find most use for content_by_lua.

The ones I have covered though are ones that you will be using most of the time. So instead of going on and on about the directives I will leave a link to the reference and you can study them at your convenience.

For now we move on to the meatier stuff. The ngx_lua API.

The ngx api

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Ah the nginx API. This is where the magic happens. Remember all those by_lua directives that we talked about in the last chapter? They are all just there to execute lua code. The stuff that makes the lua code exiting to write are all the

packages provided within openresty that allow you to script and manipulate the behaviour of nginx. In the words of the author of openresty:-

The various _by_lua and _by_lua_file configuration directives serve as gateways to the Lua API within the nginx.conf file

The nginx api is available in the form of two packages ngx and ndk . These packages are in the global scope by default and are always available to the lua directives. Which clears up a few things for us. Remember how in *_by_lua_file directives we could simply call the methods on ngx package even without requiring it? As you can probably guess, the reason for it was that the ngx package was already available to the directive globally. So there was no need for us to require it.

ngx.location.capture

Context: rewrite_by_lua, access_by_lua, content_by_lua

ngx.location.capture is one of the most powerful functions in the lua ngx api. It allows you to make subrequests to a uri(location).

What makes it so powerful you ask?

Remember the nginx location directive?

No? A quick recap:- It defines endpoints for clients to make requests to. For instance a location /hello tells the client that if you make a request to /hello I will give you back the results of code executed inside the location directive. And important point to note here is that any request made by the client to this location endpoint is an http/tcp request.

ngx.location.capture issues an internal non blocking, synchronous request to a location . Unlike the clients request which has to be http the location_capture requests involve no http overhead. It is just a fast and light internal c level call while mimicking the familiar http interface. Time for an example:-

suppose you have a location:

location /go-go-go{ ###does something in a hurry }

You can make a call to this endpoint using location capture like so”-

local res = ngx.location.capture("/go-go-go")

See how simple it is. Issue a request to the uri already defined somewhere in a location directive and capture it’s response.

Now one area where many people are confused (I admit I was too when I was first learnt about it) is that the uri must be internal. If you try to do

local res = ngx.location.capture("http://www.google.com/")

it won’t work. Because the uri is external. However if you do

local res = ngx.location.capture("/google_proxy")

where /google_proxy is in the conf as

location /google_proxy{ proxy_pass http://www.google.com/; }

then the request will work. It is important to understand that ngx.location.capture works only on internal requests (or on locations that are defined in the configuration files) but that location can make an external http request.

So now back to the topic. The res returned by ngx.location.capture contains .. well the response of the subrequest. Let us examine it.

res.status:- the status code of the completed request. res.header-: the headers returned by the response. res.body:- the body in the response which may be … res.truncated-: boolean that indicated if the body is truncated or not.

res.status, res.body and res.truncated are pretty straightforward. res.header require more examination.

The response headers are simply a lua table. Here is what it might look like

{ Vary="Accept", Etag='"E0KG1DRLA505ILRLPEJOPM679"' }

So you access the header the same way in which you access a key from any lua table. For instance to access the “vary” header we do res.header["Vary"] .

Thus far we have seen how to make only simple requests the internal uri using the ngx.location.capture but the api is far more flexible. You can pass query strings directly in the url or by using the args option. For instance:-

local res= ngx.location.capture("/hello?a=1&b=2")

and

local res = ngx.location.caputre("/hello",{args={a=1,b=2}})

are equivalent. In both the cases a subrequest will be made to /hello?a=1&b=2

In fact the optional table can hold a lot more keys than just an args .

local account_page = ngx.location.capture("/get_account", {method=ngx.HTTP_POST,body= json_body,args={user_name=name} })

The above sample illustrates the point. Here the ngx.location.capture passes in

method: You can use the ngx constants that we discussed earlier body: the body to send to the subrequest. Here it is json encoded. args: the query strings that we just discussed.

While method,body and args are the ones that you will find yourself using more frequently just for the sake of completeness a list of all the optional keys that can be passed to the table can be found in the official docs.

ngx.location.capture.multi

context: rewrite_by_lua, access_by_lua, content_by_lua*

Oh yes 🙂 Take the ngx.location.capture and level it up by lua’s superpowers. One of the unique things about lua is that a function can have multiple return values. If this is your first time working with lua then it might be a bit hard to to figure out when to use this feature. But luckily ngx lua makes the application of this unique concept quite obvious. Check this out:-

local home,about,contact = ngx.location.capture.multi{{"/home"},{"/about"},{"/contact"}}

The above snippet of code is just like ngx.location.capture that we talked about before. The only difference here is that instead of making a subrequest to a single uri you can make subrequests to multiple uris with a single line of code. Two important things to note here is that

1) These multiple subrequests run in parallel. 2) The results are returned when all the subrequests are completed.

So if you were thinking about piping the result of one subrequest into another then you are out of luck. But multiple requests are still pretty cool. Why?

Consider this scenario:- Say you have an application where you want to collect the interesting conversations across the Internet. You pull in data from various sources like twitter, facebook and linkedin. In this scenario you have to make at least three separate http requests to collect the data.

How would you do this in openresty? Like this:-

local statuses,tweets,posts = ngx.location.capture.multi{{"/facebook_graph"},{"/tweets"},{"/lnkedin"}}

and it all simply works. Now the application is not limited to external third party data aggregation. It is quite probable that internally you use many applications that work on secondary tasks and maybe you want to generate a report by querying them for updates. All you got to do is issue an ngx.location.capture.multi and you are set.

Can one use an options table like in the nginx.location.capture?

Of course you can. Here is how:-

local res1,res2 = ngx.location.capture.multi{ {"/req1",{method=ngx.HTTP_POST}}, {"req2",{args={a=1,b=2}}} }

Every request in location.capture_multi is contained within it’s own table which can do all of things that we saw in a simple ngx.location.capture . Cool isn’t it?

location capture FAQS

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Q:Is location.caputure/capture_multi synchronous?

A: Yes. location capture is synchronous but non blocking. Synchronous but non blocking? Well yes. You see the location capture provides a lua interface over what are known as subrequests in nginx world. Quoting from the article linked above:-

Subrequests may look very much like an HTTP request in appearance, their implementation, however, has nothing to do with neither the HTTP protocol nor any kind of socket communication. A subrequest is an abstract invocation for decomposing the task of the main request into smaller “internal requests” that can be served independently by multiple different location blocks, either in series or in parallel. when the Nginx core processes a subrequest, it just calls a few C functions behind the scene, without doing any kind of network or UNIX domain socket communication. For this reason, subrequests are extremely efficient.

All right we will now try to translate what a trivial location capture might look like if written using nginx configurations. For this we will be making use of the echo module. Consider a single location capture like

local res = ngx.location.capture("/url") ngx.say(res.body)

initiates a subrequest at nginx’s level and it’s equivalent to:-

location /main { echo_location /url; } location /url{ echo hello_url; }

curl http://localhost:8080/main would return “hello_url” as the response.

Where as location.capture_multi sends out a series of parallel subrequests to location blocks. For example:-

local res1,res2 = ngx.location.capture_multi{{"/url1"},{"url2"}} ngx.say(res1.body..res2.body)

the above lua code initiates multiple parallel subrequests to locations url1 and url2 . The results are returned after all the requests have been completed. The equivalent nginx code would be

location /main{ echo_location_async /url1; echo_location_async /url2; } location /url1{ echo hello_url1; } location /url2{ echo hello_url2; }

So by “synchronous yet non blocking” we mean that the subrequests are executed independently and concurrently. Yet the location.capture does not return until all the subrequests have been completed. In case you have multiple subrequests using location.capture_multi the time taken to serve all the requests will be equal the time taken by the longest request.

The ngx.location.capture() can also be interpreted as location.capture_multi{} with a single subrequest.

Of course the code above is just a simplistic translation and as we have already seen location capture can go beyond making simple “GET” requests to location blocks. But hopefully the working of location.capture/capture_multi is a bit more clearer.

Q: Can I make external http requests with location capture?

A: You sure can! Yes the subrequests are internal. Yes there is no http involved while calling the subrequests. But the subrequests are executed independently. This means that even though the subrequest is not dealing with http the location block themselves can make any kind of request that they want. Like we saw in the examples above the following will absolutely work:-

location /google{ resolver 8.8.8.8; proxy_pass http://www.google.com/; }

local res = ngx.location.capture("/google") -- the res.body should contain the html source of google.com

The req

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ngx api exposes a req object that allows us to configure explicitly our req parameters before making a request to the server. This means that you can easily add/remove http headers, body, configure the method of the req etc

On the other hand the ngx api also provides ability to read an incoming req from the client. Which means that you can read the http headers and the body check the method of the req and then create an appropriate response.

Quite naturally the req table forms a very important part of ngx api. Let us take a deeper look at it then:-

The headers of the request

ngx.req.get_headers() gives you back a table of headers for an incoming request which you can then query as usual. For example

local headers = ngx.req.get_headers() local cookie = headers["Cookie"] local etag = headers["Etag"] local host = headers["Host"]

Similarly it’s counter-part ngx.req.set_header is used to set a req header for outgoing requests

ngx.req.set_header("Content-type","application/json")

If for some reason you want the actual headers sent by the client instead of the ones that have been parsed into a table you can use ngx.req.raw_header

To clear a header you can use ngx.req.clear_header . Can be very useful when making a proxy req from the client to the server.

The body of the request

ngx provides ngx.req.read_body() to read all of the body data. Once the body has been read a convenience method is provided in ngx.req.get_body_data and ngx.req.get_post_args which return a string/lua table.

ngx.req.read_body() local args = ngx.req.get_post_args() -- just like the headers, args is a lua table.

To set the body data you can use ngx.set_body_data

The method of the request

ngx.req.get_method is used to get the method of an incoming request. ngx.req.set_method is used to set the method for an outgoing request.

local method = ngx.req.get_method ngx.req.set_method(ngx.HTTP_POST)

The uri of the request

ngx lua also allows you to change the uri from which the req was initiated by the client.

ngx.req.set_uri("/foo")

Additionally the set_uri takes in a optional boolean parameter that tells nginx to keep searching for newly set uri location

ngx.req.set_uri("/foo",true)

The context of execution becomes important in this case since it mimics the behaviour of nginx rewrite directive. Thus the only allowed context where the optional bool parameter can be used as true is the rewrite_by_lua/rewrite_by_lua_file

The url arguments

You can also modify the query string parameters of the req. Here’s how:

ngx.req.set_uri_args("a=3&b=hello%20world") ngx.req.set_uri_args({ a = 3, b = {5, 6} }) -- this will be translated as "a=3&b=5&b=6"

ngx lua allows setting the uri parameters as query strings and as lua tables. You can get the url arguments using ngx.req.get_uri_args() .

local is_test = ngx.req.get_uri_args()["test"]

The get_uri_args() returns a lua table that can be queried like a normal lua table.

The res

Back to the contents

Just like the req the ngx api allows you to modify the response that goes back to client. If you have read the ngx.location.capture section you should already be familiar with many of the functions that allow you to modify the response. Nevertheless we will take a better look here: –

The headers of the response

The ngx api gives us two ways to deal with the headers that will be sent out in the response. First there is the ngx.header that contains a list of headers that will be sent out as the response to the current request. Using ngx.header you can update an existing header or add new headers. You read from ngx.header in exactly the same way as you would read from any other lua table.

local content_type = ngx.header.content_type -- reads "Content-Type header"

Note that any ‘-‘ in a header is replaced by a ‘_’. You can still read the header in the original form like so:-

local content_type_orig = ngx.header["Content-type"]

You can set a value to the header in the same way you set a value to key in a lua table.

ngx.header.content_type = "application/json" -- sets the content type header

In case you want to set multiple values to a header you just have to pass a list of values:-

ngx.header["My-Multi-Value-Header"] = {"1","2"}

Similarly if you read a multivalued header a list will be returned as a response.

local multi_val_read = ngx.header["My-Multi-Value-Header"] -- multi_val_read = {"1","2"}

One important thing to note here is that if you try to set multiple values to a header that can only contain a single value the last item from the list will be chosen. For instance take the content type header:-

ngx.header.content_type = {'a', 'b'} would result in

ngx.header.content_type = 'b'

Although an ngx.header looks and behaves like a table it is not.The ngx.header does not return an iteratable lua table. For that purpose use:-

ngx.resp.get_headers() which is quite similar to ngx.req.get_headers() .

It simply returns a list of response headers that will be sent to the client. The value returned is a proper lua table which can be iterated upon.

local resp_headers = ngx.resp.get_headers()

Finally if you use the response from ngx.location.capture the headers are found in res.header . The result returned is a proper lua table and can be iterated upon.

The status of the response

The response status can be read and updated using the ngx.status

local status = ngx.status -- read the status of the response being sent ngx.status = ngx.HTTP_NOT_MODIFIED -- set the status code to 304. Using ngx constant here, but you may supply numerical values

The body of the response

Unlike response headers and response status there is no prepping stage for the response body.That is there is no ngx.res.body() method where you can set the body before sending the response. Openresty instead offers two methods in ngx.say() and ngx.print() any argument to the methods will be joined and sent as the res body. It is also important to note that calling any one of these methods means that the response will be sent back to the client. So the response headers and the response status that you have prepared up to this point will be sent back to the client once you call print() or say().

ngx.print("Hello world") --sends Hello world ngx.say("Hello world") -- sends Hello world/n that is the body appended with a newline ngx.say(cjson.encode({a=1,b=2})) -- you can also send json in the response body

Debugging openresty scripts

Remember our first configuration. Specifically this directive `error_log logs/error.log;. We defined all of the errors to be logged in the ./logs/error.log file. One of the ways to read from the error log is to set a tail on it like so:-

tail -f ./logs/error.log

The -f option is for “following” the error log and outputting the results when new data is added to it.

There is however another method that involves configuring nginx conf file to tell it to automatically output the error to the terminal. Add this line to your configuration file:-

error_log /dev/stderr;

and now all your errors will be logged to the terminal.

But error logs are only effective when an error occurs in our program. What if we want to say quickly see the value of a variable? For these cases we can use a combination of ngx.log() and the nginx’s logging constants to write to the error log. For instance we can do this:-

local body = res.body ngx.log(ngx.ERR,body)

and it will append the body data to the error log. One of the areas where I feel that openresty is lagging in the code inspection part. Unlike it’s name ngx.print() does not print to the console but instead outputs the data to the client. Although using a combination of displaying the error log on the console and openresty’s log functions we can display results on our terminal but still it is not as good as say console.log() in node js. Maybe the tooling for debugging openresty scripts will improve in the future. But it’s a minor impedance that does not bother much once you get used to it.zerobrane studio– If you can’t print on the terminal just change your ide!

Recently I came to know about zerobrane studio a lightweight IDE for lua written in lua! Among other things it allows you to debug openresty scripts.

Now I know it’s hard to simply switch editors from one project to another but I think it’s a worthwhile to try out zerobrane for you openresty project because the default debugging is is a bit hard to get your head around.

What with all the changes one has to do in the config files and all the `ngx.log()` statements one has to write in the code and the all the despair that one has to experience when one learns that `ngx.print()` statement does not actually print, one might give up just because he can’t get `ngx.var.test_var` to show up on the screen! Which would be a shame. Why not try an IDE that allows you to debug your openresty scripts without setting off the annoying sound on your blood pressure monitor? It’s a heavenly feeling if you thimk about it.

Also when you see the author showing off this live coding video it’s hard not to drool a little.

Global variables in openresty

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In the previous sections we stressed on using local variables by default and refrain from using global variables in ngx_lua. I will try to expand a bit on the reason for the emphasis.

ngx_lua is designed with the principle of request isolation in mind. According to this principle every request handler is run in it’s own co routine with it’s own environment. Two requests handlers do not share data between them and are executed independently of one another. It follows therefore that the global variables that are defined in the context of one request handler will not be accessible from another request handler. And if you try to access what you think is a global variable it will only result in nil errors.

But what about modules?

Openresty allows you to use your own modules as well as the modules that come with it. A statement like local module = require("/dir/packer")

will load the package “packer” in the local variable “module”. But what if we require this module again in another handler would lua reload the package again? No it wouldn’t. That is because after package is loaded it is cached inside a package.loaded table in lua. Any subsequent requests for that module will simply read from the package.loaded table. So there will no performance penalties. Remember though that when you set lua_code_cache to off the packages are not cached and are reloaded on every request.

True global variables in ngx_lua can be declared in the init_by_lua directive. Any global variable that you declare here will be accessible from all the nginx’s request handlers.

So we can combine the facts that lua caches it’s modules in a package.loaded table and that global variables can be declared in the init_by_lua directive and derive a very useful conclusion out of it. That any module you load in the init_by_lua will be accessible from all the request handler without any need of requiring it. So all those modules that you need across many different request handlers can be declared here. I find that the cjson module that come prepackaged with lua to be a good contender for global declaration since almost all my request handlers use it.

In fact global variables themselves are loaded into the _ENV table. Thus any global variable that you access is a table look up which can be expensive as compared to accessing a local variable. If you want to know why check out this question on stackoverflow.

Working with JSON in openresty

Openresty comes with cjson pre installed. The usage of cjson in lua is pretty simple. You use cjson.encode() to encode the data into json and cjson.decode to decode it. However lua has a couple of unique features that might catch you off guard. So we will walk through a couple of examples to see how lua encodes and decodes json using cjson. And yes there are other json encoders and decoders but cjson is considered the best among them.

Before we see the actual examples I would suggest that you install cjson and inspect. I am using lua 5.2 for this guide and I’ve put cjson and inspect in /usr/local/lib/lua/5.2/ directory. Finally you could copy and paste the code in the lua shell or you can just clone this file and execute it (in the terminal type lua followed by file name).

JSON basically consists of only two data structures. An object/hash/dictionary and an array. An object in json will be translated to a table in lua. An array in json will also be translated to a table in lua…. That is because in lua arrays are represented as tables. In fact lua has only one data structure tables. Every other data structure is implemented on the top of a table. For example this is a simple table in lua

local simple_table = { des = "I am a simple table" }

This seems pretty close to what a json object looks like right? To access the properties of this table you do simple_table.des or simple_table["des"] . Now here is what an array looks like in lua:-

local simple_arr = {"three","little","pigs"}

just like a table except without the keys. In array the items are indexed by numbers starting from 1 (more on this below) so you access an array just like you access a table except with numbers instead of named keys. So a simple_arr[1] will give “three” as the output. simple_arr[2] will give “little” as output and so on.

Let us now inspect how a complex json object is decoded

//json object { "admins": { "names": ["superuser"], "roles": ["admins"] }, "members": { "names": ["user1","user2"], "roles": ["developers"] } }

When decoded using cjson.decode() it would be converted into the following lua table.

{ admins = { names = { "superuser" }, roles = { "admins" } }, members = { names = { "user1", "user2" }, roles = { "developers" } } }

as you can see the arrays are converted to lua tables. So how do we access the properties of this table?

Suppose we want to access the members of the decoded json. It is quite simple

local members = json_decoded.members

How about the names of the members?

local user1 = members.names[1]

Note the index of the array. It is 1. But shouldn’t it be zero? Well in lua the arrays are indexed starting from 1. So for example:-

local lua_arr = {'one','two','three'} lua_arr[1] -- one lua_arr[2] --two lua_arr[3] -- three

this might be confusing at first as it is different from almost every other programming language but once you are aware of this fact it won’t cause any other problems. cjson decodes null in a json to a lua lightuserdata and gives you cjson.null for comparison.

This should help you deal with any kind of json you come across in lua. If you encounter any problems refer to the cjson manual it is quite small and easy to understand.

Organizing openresty code

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When you are building openresty applications you are usually working either with the nginx configuration files or with the lua code in various *by_lua_directives. Therefore structuring openresty applications involves organizing the nginx’s configuration files and organizing the lua code. I have not come upon any guideline that lays down the principle for doing this so I am just going to write down how I structure my code for openresty applications. Maybe that will help you….

nginx configuration files

I always split my nginx configuration files on the server block. One portion of the file contains a set of global directives that will be used by all the blocks. This is the main file. The other file then contains location blocks for different server blocks and they are all included in the main configuration by the include directive. For example here is what my main configuration file looks like”-

worker_processes 1; error_log /dev/stderr; #nginx -p ./ -c ./wrinq.ngx.conf events { worker_connections 1024; } http { lua_code_cache off; #only during development init_by_lua 'cjson = require("cjson")'; include mime.types; root ./; server { server_name localhost; listen 3125; include ./routes.conf; } }

Here is a portion of “routes.conf”

location /couchdb{ proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5984/$arg_endpoint?$args; } location /paypal_adaptive_api{ resolver 8.8.8.8; proxy_pass https://svcs.sandbox.paypal.com/AdaptivePayments/Pay; }

To nginx it makes no difference (for it it’s all one big config file) but it helps me focus when I separate out the configuration for location blocks from global configuration. Global configuration has hardly changed since I first committed it but I regularly update the “routes.conf” file. The benefit of splitting on location is that in one quick glance of your main file you can tell how many servers you are using, what their addresses are, what configuration they are working with. And this is very useful to me since in one configuration I usually define multiple server blocks depending upon the requirements. The main configuration file thus serves as a “table of contents” for my application.

The lua code

The organization of lua code is mostly similar to what you would do in any lua application. You create lua files. For repeat behaviour you extract out the functions into modules. Use those modules in your files by requiring them. Basic stuff.

Openresty however allows you to add lua scripts as strings. Do not do this. It makes things impossibly hard to debug. Plus writing code becomes a chore as the text editor refuses to analyze the code does not provide any code completion etc. Lots of inconvenience that can be avoided simply by using *by_lua_file directives.

As to the directory structure. I like to use the one that I defined in the beginning of the book.

logs folder- for the nginx’s logs

lua folder – for the lua code

and all the configuration files in the parent directory. Simple and straightforward.

But if you have a preferred way of organizing your code feel free to do it that way. All that matters is that when you read your code it should be easy for you to understand it. Apart from that use whatever that suits you.

[generate barebones openresty applications from the command line]

Concurrency in openresty

Back to the contents

Openresty supports concurrency on two different levels. On nginx level and on lua level. We’ll talk about both. Let’s start with nginx.

When nginx starts it’s execution it spawns a master process. This master process is responsible for reading, checking, loading configuration files and communicating with worker processes. All of the actual work is done by the worker processes. The number of worker process is specified in the configuration file by the worker_processes directive. Generally one worker process per cpu core is used. So far so good.

The handling of requests by the worker processes is much more interesting. Each worker process runs in a single thread of execution “reacting” to the signals from the master. Events coming on the master process are passed along to the worker processes or stored in a queue from where it is read by a worker process. The worker processes handle these events but they don’t wait around for them to be completed. When they are notified of the completion they send back the response. This is what it looks like inside nginx

An event happens —-> worker sends the request to be processed in a handler —–> worker starts servicing other events —–> on completion of event it sends back the response.

Concurrency in lua is implemented with the help of coroutines. A coroutine is a lightweight(green) thread that is spawned from the lua’s execution environment. It is important to note that a coroutine is not an os level thread. It is a separate process with it’s own stack and a line of execution that is runs in collaboration with lua’s execution loop.

A good explanation of what problems coroutines solve is given in this stackoverflow answer

“The problem coroutines resolve is ‘I want to have a function I can execute for a while, then go back to do other thing, and then come back and have the same state I had when I left it’. “Notice that I didn’t say ‘I want it to keep running while I do other things”; the flow of code “stops” on the coroutine, and only continues on it when you go back to it.'”

At any time you can only have one coroutine running but that coroutine can suspend it’s execution and resume it from the point where it left.

“Synchronous yet non blocking everywhere–or how event loops and coroutines come together in openresty”

One of things about lua’s coroutines is that the responsibility of scheduling them lies upon the programmer. That is to say they are not scheduled by the language run time. Openresty introduces a concept of light threads which are just lua’s coroutines scheduled by the ngx_lua environment.

Openresty’s directives– content_by_lua,rewrite_by_lua,access_by_lua are run independently in their own light threads. Scheduling and other thread level management tasks are handled by ngx_lua run time on your behalf. You don’t have to write any code for spawning or aborting the execution thread. So when in a location block you do:

location /some_location { content_by_lua 'ngx.say("hello")'; }

The code inside the content_by_lua directive handler is run in it’s own thread. That thread is automatically created for you by the ngx_lua run time.

Not all directives are run in this way though. One example of this is the set_by_lua directive which is blocking. You can do a quick check in the official openresty manual to see which directives are run in their own coroutines and which are not.

Since most of the “heavy” code for an openresty application is written within these three directives(access,content and rewrite) majority of your application would be concurrent by default. You’ve just got to be careful around those directives that are blocking.

The luaJIT VM

There is one more level of concurrency introduced by openresty that we should discuss here. This works on the luaJIT VM level. All the lua code in openresty is executed by luaJIT. Just in case you didn’t know LuaJIT is a just in time compiler for lua renowned for it’s speed and efficiency. Openresty spawns a sandboxed luaJIT execution environment for every nginx worker process.

Since we usually keep a worker thread per cpu core. So this more or less means one luaJIT VM per cpu core. Now we have everything we need to understand the concurrency model of openresty.

The nginx master process handles the configuration files and passes along the signals to… The worker process which are responsible to run “event_handlers”. Openresty starts a luaJIT VM for each of the worker processes. The lua “directive handlers” are executed by the luaJIT VM corresponding to the worker process. Some of these lua_directives( “content_by_lua”,”access_by_lua” and “rewrite_by_lua” to be specific) are run in light threads which are scheduled by the ngx_lua runtime. It must be kept in mind that these are not OS level threads but rather threads on the luaJIT VM level. Light, efficient quick to create and destroy and managed by the ngx_lua instead of the programmer. Finally within the lua code concurrency is achieved with the help of the thread api (manually) and also by using location capture api (automatically)

All in all it is very difficult to write blocking code in openresty 🙂

resty cli

The resty cli allows you to run your openresty scripts from the terminal like you’d run your normal lua scripts.

The resty cli comes packaged with openresty. You don’t need to install it separately. It is present in the bin sub directory of the openresty install path. On my machine resty was at /usr/local/openresty/bin

So if you export this path with export PATH=/usr/local/openresty/bin:$PATH you can invoke the resty client directly from the terminal like so:-

which resty /usr/local/openresty/bin

“What can I do with resty cli?”

You can use resty cli as a test runner for your openresty scripts. Or maybe build command line utilities. Personally I use it to run tests. The usage of resty cli is pretty simple and straightforward. You can either pass a lua string to be executed or the name of the lua file as an argument to the resty command.

resty -e "ngx.say('hello world')"

resty hello_world.lua

“How does it work”

The resty cli is simply a perl program. It works by creating a temporary directory which mimics the usual nginx directory structure. Within this directory you have your configuration files, a logs directory and other sub-directories and files that are common in any nginx application.

The config file contains the rules of what all is allowed to be executed by the cli and what all is not. Here’s what it looks like:-

error_log /dev/stderr warn; #error_log /dev/stderr debug; events { worker_connections $conns; } http { access_log off; lua_socket_log_errors off; resolver @nameservers; $lua_package_path_config init_by_lua ' --lua code to initlize the global lua VM '; init_worker_by_lua ' $loader -- perl variable for loading lua files -- rest of lua code to execute the loaded file -- in a timer. '; }

All the code that is passed to the resty client is run against this configuration file. One thing that becomes quite apparent at first glance is that there is no server block in the config. This means that you can’t have a headless nginx instance that listens to incoming connections. The error_log directive prints all the errors on the terminal instead of the error file.

The init_by_lua directive prepares the resty client for the execution of the inputs that are given from the terminal. Once the initialization is complete the actual execution is handed off to init_worker_by_lua.

The $loader is just a perl function that reads the lua code that is input either as a string or as a file. It passes on this code to an nginx timer function where the code is compiled and executed in a loadstring.

local ok, err = ngx.timer.at(0, function () -- io.stderr:write("timer firing") local ok, err = pcall(gen) -- the $loader function loads the compiled code in a gen variable if not ok then return handle_err(err) end local rc = err if rc and type(rc) ~= "number" then return handle_err("bad return value of type " .. type(rc)) end return exit(rc) end) if not ok then return handle_err(err) end -- print("timer created") end) if not ok then return handle_err(err) end

Since everything is executed in the context of an ngx.timer.at you can only use the api that is available within ngx.timer.at This means that you can’t use ngx.location.capture with resty client, which is logical since the nginx config file is not listening to any incoming connections due to the absence of the server block but …. 🙁 At least you’ve still got a good chunk of api available to play with. Look at the bright side, glass half full and all that I suppose.

“But how come ngx.print and ngx.say work?”

Puzzled me too. ngx.say() and ngx.print() are a part of downstream api that sends back the http response to the client. Both ngx.print and ngx.say are disabled in the context of ngx.timer.at which means that you shouldn’t be able to use it right? Right. So then what gives?

local function output(...) local args = {...} return stdout:write(expand_table(args, true)) end ngx.print = output

ngx.say = function (...) local ok, err = output(...) if ok then return output("\\\

") end return ok, err end print = ngx.say

Well it seems that ngx.print and ngx.say functions are overwritten to display the output on the terminal instead of sending back an http response. Sort of an anticlimax in my opinion I expected something more exotic.