I realized that I did status updates for security fixes in NGINX Extended... 1.14 (sic!). The thing is that in the meantime the entire stable 1.16 went through and here we are now, 1.18 is ready. I did communicate subsequent releases on Twitter, but there were a few changes that deserve at least a small blogpost.

First, not only Ubuntu LTS are now supported. Interim releases will receive builds too, but they will stay in the given version when that release reaches EOL. Here's a good looking chart on when that might be: The Ubuntu lifecycle and release cadence. For now Xenial is the only affected release.

Second, there are now mainline builds available. Should you need to use them or for testing purposes, here's how to add the relevant PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hadret/nginx-mainline
sudo apt-get update

At this moment it equals the stable branch, but the new 1.19 NGINX releases are coming early next month.

Finally, I backported ModSecurity 3.0[1] to Bionic (18.04) and NGINX Extended incorporates official SpiderLabs ModSecurity-nginx module. Be sure to give it a try!

Last time I made plans for "what's next?". Xenial did stop at 1.14, pagespeed was dropped (it was too much of a hassle to maintain it), ldap and upsync stayed where they are and brotli support has been introduced.

This time around I'm planning on modernizing my build environment a little bit and pushing few Extended changes towards Debian directly.[2] Let's see what the future holds.

  1. v3.0.4 to be exact. ↩︎

  2. VTS should be a standard these days. ↩︎