Examine Additional Custom Templates

Finally, to conclude this lab, we will log in as Paul Platops and import additional template examples developed by the NGINX community. Some are simple, such as a basic location block, while others are more advanced, like health checks and OIDC. These examples will demonstrate the flexibility of this feature and the wide variety of use cases it supports. Many of these templates can be customized to suit your needs, depending on your specific NGINX use cases.

  1. Click the person icon in the top right corner, then click the Logout link.

  2. Click Sign In. You will be redirected to KeyCloak. When prompted for credentials, enter the following:

    User: paulplatops
    Password: NIM123!@#

  3. Click the Instance Manager tile.

  4. In the left navigation, click Templates.

  5. Click the green + Create button in the upper right corner.

  6. Click Browse to select a template to import from the JumpHost’s file system.

  7. Select the n1_templates_http_examples.tar.gz file, and click Open.

    There is a wide selection of templates here for common NGINX use-cases.

  8. Click the green Parse button in the lower right to scan and analyze the contents of this template bundle.

  9. As you did earlier in the lab, check the Allow Signature Bypass checkbox to override the import dialog.

  10. Below the checkbox, you should note that there are multiple Templates detected in the bundle.

    ../../_images/nim-templates-bundle.png

  11. Click the Import button at the bottom right.

Conclusion

As you have witnessed, NIM’s Templating framework gives organizations the control they need to empower users of their NGINX platform. Via templates, these users can apply use cases to their application delivery tier without requiring they be NGINX configuration experts. Additionally, the framework allows organizations to provide this capability to users in a “least-privileged” manner - only granting them permissions to execute templates on the instances they have been assigned. This ensures compliance, and significantly narrows the “blast radius” in the event an outage occurs due to human error while configuring.