nginx (engine x) is an open source, one-man reverse proxy and mail proxy server, as well as a high-performance and lightweight web (HTTP) server for Linux, BSD and Windows operating systems. It is described by its developer as a plus for mission critical environments.
Features at a glance
Major highlights include accelerated reverse proxying with caching, accelerated support with caching of SCGI, FastCGI, uwsgi, and memcached servers, a modular architecture, as well as TLS SNI and SSL support.
The mail proxy server features support for SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), STLS, STARTTLS encrypted protocols, several authentication methods for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP, user redirection to a POP3 or IMAP servers, as well as user authentication and connection redirection. Among other interesting features, we can mention support for kqueue, sendfile, File AIO, DIRECTIO, accept-filters, and much, much more.
It can process numerous SSI inclusions at the same time, within a single web page, if they’re controlled by FastCGI or proxied servers. Additionally, the HTTP server part of the program supports validation of HTTP referer, MP4 and FLV streaming, embedded Perl, response rate limiting, redirection for 3xx-5xx error codes, as well as support for pipelined and keep-alive connections.
Servers both index and static files
The software can serve both index and static files, provides users with fault tolerance and simple load balancing, various filters like XSLT, gzipping, SSI, image transformation, chunked responses, and byte ranges.
Because it provides easy, logical and flexible configuration, several well known websites use the nginx software to deliver their users with high quality and unique information. Among these, we can mention WordPress.com, Netflix, and FastMail.FM.
Supported operating systems
At the moment, nginx has been successfully tested on Linux 2.2-3 (32-bit), Linux 2.6-3 (64-bit), FreeBSD 3-10 (32-bit), FreeBSD 5-10 (64-bit), Solaris 9 (32-bit), Solaris 10 (32-bit and 64-bit), AIX 7.1 (PowerPC), HP-UX 11.31 (IA64), Mac OS X (PowerPC and 32-bit), Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.
