
UPDATE (April 26, 2019): this post has been updated to include latest changes made to the project. You can jump directly to it here →
I was lucky enough that in relatively early time in my career I bet on NGINX as my default HTTP server and essentially never looked back. Sure enough, I started with using it as reverse-proxy in front of Apache, but once it matured enough and I felt confident it can be trusted with essentially any HTTP-related task, I switched entirely. It was a long time ago and NGINX has made some tremendous progress since then. While its adoption didn’t exceed Apache so far, it’s in the second place for quite some time now and growing in numbers each month. I was always fond of it being so lightweight and I preferred usage of FastCGI protocol instead of native/built-in one as it was the case with Apache at that time.
The caveat is that, while being Open Source application, there are some functionalities that are available only for the paying customers (NGINX Plus). I don’t mind this kind of business model. After all, this is a great application and I hope it will stay around for years to come and the only way to achieve that goal is to keep it sustainable, financially-wise. On the other hand, I’m not able to afford NGINX Plus subscription model (especially for private use-case like mine). Fortunately enough, there are some NGINX enthusiasts out there that are creating 3rd party modules for their favourite HTTP server. Quite a few of them.