nginx is a high-performance web server and reverse proxy designed to handle large numbers of concurrent connections with efficient resource usage. It can serve static website content directly or forward requests to applications and other web servers.
The software uses an event-driven architecture that allows worker processes to manage many connections without allocating a separate thread or process to each request. This approach makes nginx well suited to busy websites, web applications and network services.
Beyond serving web pages, nginx provides load balancing, TLS termination and configurable HTTP response caching. It is commonly deployed in front of application servers to improve performance, manage incoming traffic and provide a consistent interface for client connections.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Static content delivery – efficiently serves HTML, images, stylesheets, scripts and other website resources.
- Reverse proxy – forwards HTTP requests to backend applications and web servers.
- HTTP caching – stores reusable upstream responses using configurable disk-based caches.
- FastCGI caching – caches responses generated by FastCGI applications.
- Cache revalidation – uses conditional requests to check whether stored responses remain current.
- Stale-content handling – optionally serves expired responses during upstream failures or cache updates.
- Cache locking – limits simultaneous requests attempting to populate the same cache object.
- Load balancing – distributes requests between backend servers using configurable policies.
- HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 – supports modern HTTP protocols and associated connection handling.
- TLS termination – manages encrypted connections and certificate configuration.
- Virtual hosting – serves multiple websites through separate server configurations.
- URL rewriting – modifies request handling and performs redirects through configurable rules.
- Traffic controls – limits request rates, concurrent connections and data transfer speeds.
- Content compression – supports gzip compression and related response handling.
- Access controls – restricts requests using network addresses and HTTP authentication.
- Logging – provides configurable access and error logs for monitoring and troubleshooting.
Website: nginx.org
Support:
Developer: Nginx, Inc.
License: BSD 2-Clause ‘Simplified’ License
nginx is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
| Web Caches | |
|---|---|
| Vinyl | Web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind |
| HAProxy | High availability load balancer and proxy server |
| 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 |
| Envoy | High performance edge and service proxy |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server |
| Apache | Hugely popular web server with caching modules |
| Souin | HTTP cache system |
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 |
| Tengine | Distribution of nginx |
| lighttpd | Fast, compliant and very flexible low memory footprint web server |
| Ferron | Web server optimized for speed, security and efficiency |
| CivetWeb | Small embeddable web server library written in C |
| 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 |
| Yaws | High-performance web server written in Erlang |
| 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 | |
|---|---|
| Vinyl | Web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind |
| HAProxy | High availability load balancer and proxy server |
| 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 |
| Envoy | High performance edge and service proxy |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server |
| Apache | Hugely popular web server with caching modules |
| Souin | HTTP cache system |
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 |
| Envoy | High-performance edge and service proxy built for cloud-native applications |
| APISIX | Real-time API gateway with routing, security and extensive plugin support |
| gobetween | Modern and minimalistic L4 load balancer and reverse-proxy |
| MetalLB | Adds external network service support to bare-metal Kubernetes clusters |
| Seesaw | Linux Virtual Server (LVS) based load balancing platform. L4 load balancer |
| Skipper | HTTP router and reverse proxy with flexible filters and route matching |
| LoxiLB | Cloud-native networking proxy with eBPF acceleration and observability |
| kube-vip | Provides virtual IPs and service networking across Kubernetes clusters |
| 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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