Nginx Configuration for Laravel: Production-Ready Setup

Nginx serves over 34% of all websites globally and is the recommended web server for Laravel. A properly configured setup handles thousands of concurrent requests efficiently.

Complete Laravel Nginx Config

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    server_name example.com;
    root /var/www/myapp/public;
    index index.php;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
    ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;

    gzip on;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml;
    gzip_min_length 1000;

    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN" always;
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff" always;
    add_header Referrer-Policy "strict-origin-when-cross-origin" always;

    location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js|woff2)$ {
        expires 30d;
        add_header Cache-Control "public, immutable";
    }

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.3-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\. {
        deny all;
    }
}

PHP-FPM Pool Tuning

[www]
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 50
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 5
pm.max_spare_servers = 35
pm.max_requests = 500

Formula: max_children = (Total RAM - OS RAM) / Average PHP Process Size. A typical process uses 30-50MB.

Rate Limiting

limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=api:10m rate=10r/s;

location /api/ {
    limit_req zone=api burst=20 nodelay;
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}

This setup gives you SSL, compression, caching, security headers, and rate limiting — covering 90% of production needs.