I am biased, but call me underwhelmed. It seems that with every "new" feature, nginx is copying Apache httpd, even now claiming to be the "swiss army knife" of web-servers. Embedded languages. Dynamic modules. Support of uWSGI. gracefull restarts. Thread pools... and yet people eat it up. Just goes to show what having corporate-backed marketing and PR can do.
When I started with apache, I thought it was great, but after moving to nginx, the speed and simplicity made me never look back. While these new features to nginx aren't new to the world, they are a nice welcome addition to a system that IMO is far superior to apache.
I never found Nginx especially simple to setup, the config files were always messy. Caddy seems to have knocked this out of the park for me, especially considering automated https, and redirection.
I use Caddy on all my small projects right now. I haven't used it long enough to install enough faith for production sized systems yet, but hopefully I will get there because it is much easier to setup. Still, nginx is a breeze compared to apache IMO
I share your love for Caddy, but having worked with all three, I do agree that nginx is easier than Apache. The config file isn't perfect, but I wouldn't call it messy, and I prefer it's syntax httpd's. But to each their own.
Simpler than apache doesn't mean simple. As someone who sets up HTTP servers rarely, I had trouble when I tried out NGINIX.
But I suspect for people who do it more seriously, then it's nginix config hits the sweet spot. To me the language seems sophisticated, well documented and fairly well behaved if you pay attention to the rules.
That's can make it too hard for someone casually trying to quick-start some experimental project. But it's exactly what you want if you are maintaining a long-lived set up that is likely to grow and become complicated over time.
Because people have a hard time figuring out what it is. Could you explain what it is? What benefits does it have to make it worth exploring? To me it looks like a rather invasive but flexible and dynamically configurable inetd. But it forces you to use its own libraries to receive http requests.
It's a lot like OpenResty (https://openresty.org/en/), which is Nginx with a Lua interpreter embedded and bridged to its request-response cycle (the OpenResty page explains the point of that pretty well); but instead of Lua, Unit has a bunch of other language runtimes embedded.
I haven't found any embedded interpreters or runtimes here. Quite the opposite, I see they have libraries they ship with other languages that a user has to use in order to receive http requests.
Why remove Lua, though? I'm a heavy Lua user, which is why I use the openresty bundle of nginx. There's no reason for me to try this out. This is unfortunate!
I agree. Apache has great module support. I think their worst sin was that their debian package defaulted to a small number of workers and using a forking mpm leading people to believe apache was slow.
Their eventing/threaded mpm is basically nginx.
And now nignx is starting to gain the features of apache.
