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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
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  4. Web Servers
  5. NGINX Unit vs OpenResty

NGINX Unit vs OpenResty

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

OpenResty
OpenResty
Stacks2.3K
Followers227
Votes0
NGINX Unit
NGINX Unit
Stacks86
Followers199
Votes11
GitHub Stars5.6K
Forks365

NGINX Unit vs OpenResty: What are the differences?

  1. Integration with NGINX: One key difference is that NGINX Unit is a standalone application server, while OpenResty is a web platform based on NGINX with added Lua scripting capabilities.
  2. Request Routing: NGINX Unit uses a more dynamic approach to request routing, allowing configurations to be changed without restarting the server, while OpenResty typically requires reloading configurations or restarting the server to apply changes.
  3. Language Support: NGINX Unit primarily supports multiple language runtimes such as Python, PHP, and Go, while OpenResty focuses on Lua for server-side scripting.
  4. Module Ecosystem: OpenResty offers a wide range of pre-built modules and third-party modules for extending functionality, while NGINX Unit has a more limited selection of modules available.
  5. Performance: NGINX Unit is designed for microservices and containerized environments, optimizing for high performance and low resource usage, whereas OpenResty is better suited for complex web applications requiring extensive customization and integration.
  6. Community Support: OpenResty has a larger and more active community compared to NGINX Unit, providing a wealth of resources, plugins, and community contributions.

In Summary, NGINX Unit is focused on microservices and resource optimization, while OpenResty offers extensive customization and Lua scripting capabilities for complex web applications.

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Detailed Comparison

OpenResty
OpenResty
NGINX Unit
NGINX Unit

OpenResty (aka. ngx_openresty) is a full-fledged web application server by bundling the standard Nginx core, lots of 3rd-party Nginx modules, as well as most of their external dependencies.

NGINX Unit is a dynamic web application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages. Unit is lightweight, polyglot, and dynamically configured via API. The design of the server allows reconfiguration of specific application parameters as needed by the engineering or operations.

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Fully dynamic reconfiguration using RESTful JSON API;Multiple application languages and versions can run simultaneously;Dynamic application processes management (coming soon);TLS support (coming soon);TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2 routing and proxying (coming soon)
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
5.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
365
Stacks
2.3K
Stacks
86
Followers
227
Followers
199
Votes
0
Votes
11
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 3
    PHP
  • 2
    Golang
  • 2
    Multilang
  • 2
    Python
  • 1
    Ruby
Integrations
NGINX
NGINX
Perl
Perl
Python
Python
Golang
Golang
PHP
PHP
Ruby
Ruby

What are some alternatives to OpenResty, NGINX Unit?

NGINX

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

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