Preface

It is a well-known fact that the market for web servers has a long-established leader: Apache. According to recent surveys conducted in October 2015, almost 35 percent of the World Wide Web is served by this twenty-year old open source application. However, the same reports reveal the rise of a new competitor in the past few years: Nginx, a lightweight HTTP server originating from Russia and pronounced "engine x". What has caused so many server administrators to switch to Nginx since the beginning of the 2009? Is this tiny piece of software mature enough to run a high-traffic website?

To begin with, Nginx is not as young as one might think. Originally started in 2002, the project was first carried out by a standalone developer, Igor Sysoev, for the needs of an extremely high-traffic Russian website, namely Rambler, which received, as of September 2008, over 500 million HTTP requests per day. The application is now used to serve some of the most popular websites on the Web, such as Reddit, Wikipedia, WordPress, Dropbox, and many more. Nginx has proved to be a very efficient, lightweight yet powerful web server. Throughout the chapters in this book, you will discover the numerous features of Nginx and progressively understand why so many administrators decide to place their trust in this new HTTP server, often at the expense of Apache.

There are several aspects in which Nginx is more efficient than its competitors. First, and foremost, it's faster. By making use of asynchronous sockets, Nginx does not spawn processes as many times as it receives requests. One process per core suffices to handle thousands of connections, leading to a much lighter CPU load and memory consumption. Secondly, its simplicity of use is remarkable. Configuration files are much easier to read and tweak with Nginx than with other web server solutions, such as Apache; a couple of lines are enough to set up a complete virtual host configuration.

Last but not least, server administrators appreciate it for its modularity. Not only is Nginx a completely open source project released under a BSD-like license, but it also comes with a powerful plugin system referred to as "modules". A large variety of modules are included with the original distribution archive, and a number of third-party ones can be downloaded online.

All in all, Nginx combines speed, efficiency, and power to provide you with the perfect ingredients for a successful web server. It appears to be the best Apache alternative as of today.