System designJun 14, 2026
Six Stations, Six Ways to Die: A Request's Journey for Survival
Technical notes & reflection — on the road every request must travel, and why it travels that way.
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#nginx add_header inheritance
System design
Software EngineeringJun 11, 2026
Nginx Isn't Acting Up — You're Just Reading the Config Wrong
There's a funny paradox among developers: we'll happily argue for a week about whether the backend should be written in Rust, Go, or Node.js — but when it's time to ship to production, 90% of us quietly type apt install nginx and stick it out front. Nginx is everyone's go-to gatekeeper — and also the thing that has people debugging until 2 a.m., still unable to figure out why one simple request keeps returning a 404. Here's the interesting part: the bug is almost never in Nginx. It's that we read the config file like a script that runs top to bottom — when that's not how Nginx works at all. This isn't a listicle of "common Nginx errors" for you to copy-paste onto your server. The goal is to hand you a mental model: to understand how Nginx thinks, so the seemingly magical traps below become predictable instead of leaving you staring blankly at the screen.
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