nginx is a free, lightweight, open-source, very powerful and efficient web server and reverse proxy. It uses a scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture in contrast to a threaded or process-oriented approach to handling requests. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.
This server can be used as standalone HTTP server and as a reverse proxy server before some Apache or another big server to reduce load to backend servers by many concurrent HTTP-sessions.
nginx can also act as a POP3/IMAP mail proxy with SSL and TLS SNI support.
Key Features
- Handling of static files, index files, and auto-indexing.
- Accelerated reverse proxy with caching.
- Load balancing.
- Fault tolerance.
- Accelerated support with caching of remote FastCGI servers; simple load balancing and fault tolerance.
- IPv6 support.
- Low memory usage and high concurrency.
- Modular architecture. Filters include gzipping, byte ranges, chunked responses, XSLT, SSI, and image resizing filter. Multiple SSI inclusions within a single page can be processed in parallel if they are handled by FastCGI or proxied servers.
- SSL and TLS SNI support.
- Name-based and IP-based virtual servers.
- Keep-alive and pipelined connections support.
- Flexible configuration.
- Reconfiguration and online upgrade without interruption of the client processing.
- Access log formats, buffered log writing, and quick log rotation.
- 3xx-5xx error codes redirection.
- The rewrite module.
- Access control based on client IP address and HTTP Basic authentication.
- The PUT, DELETE, MKCOL, COPY and MOVE methods.
- FLV streaming.
- MP4 streaming.
- Speed limitation.
- Limitation of simultaneous connections or requests from one address.
- Embedded Perl.
- WebDAV.
- Keepalive connections may be closed prematurely.
- Support for keepalive connections to upstream servers.
- Consolidation of multiple simultaneous requests to upstream servers if caching is used.
- Support for multiple request and connection limits used simultaneously.
- Reduced memory consumption in various edge cases like handling of long-lived requests.
Website: nginx.org
Support: Wiki, Code Repository
Developer: Nginx, Inc.
License: 2-clause BSD
nginx is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
| Web Caches | |
|---|---|
| Varnish Cache | Web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind |
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server and reverse proxy |
| Traffic Server | High-performance building block for cloud services |
| Memcached | Distributed memory object caching system |
| Squid | High-performance proxy caching server and web cache daemon |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server |
| Apache | Hugely popular web server with caching modules |
Related Software
| Web Servers | |
|---|---|
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server powering the top web sites |
| Apache | Like nginx, Apache is a hugely popular web server |
| Caddy | Powerful, enterprise-ready web server written in Go |
| Lwan | Experimental, scalable, high performance HTTP server |
| H2O | Optimized HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 server |
| lighttpd | Fast, compliant and very flexible low memory footprint web server |
| Ferron | Web server optimized for speed, security and efficiency |
| Angie | Scalable web server that was forked from nginx |
| Algernon | Small self-contained pure-Go web server |
| Node.js | Server-side JavaScript environment for network applications |
| Hiawatha | Web server that focuses on security |
| OpenLiteSpeed | Lightweight HTTP server |
| rwasa | Full-featured high performance web server |
| devd | Local web server for developers |
| Cherokee | Fast, flexible and embeddable web server |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Web Caches | |
|---|---|
| Varnish Cache | Web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind |
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server and reverse proxy |
| Traffic Server | High-performance building block for cloud services |
| Memcached | Distributed memory object caching system |
| Squid | High-performance proxy caching server and web cache daemon |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server |
| Apache | Hugely popular web server with caching modules |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Load Balancers | |
|---|---|
| Traefik | Modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer |
| HAProxy | High availability layer 7 load balancer and proxy server for TCP and HTTP |
| Cilium | eBPF-based Networking, Observability, Security |
| nginx | Includes a L7 load balancer |
| RoadRunner | High-performance PHP application server, load balancer, and process manager |
| fabio | Fast, modern, zero-conf load balancing HTTP(S) and TCP router |
| BFE | Modern L7 load balancer |
| gobetween | Modern and minimalistic L4 load balancer and reverse-proxy |
| Seesaw | Linux Virtual Server (LVS) based load balancing platform. L4 load balancer |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server and HTTP/TCP load balancer |
| GLB Director | Set of stateless L4 load balancer servers |
| Balance | Generic TCP proxy with round robin load balancing and failover capabilities |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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