NGINX vs OpenResty

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OpenResty vs nginx: What are the differences?

OpenResty and Nginx are both popular web server and reverse proxy server solutions. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Architecture: OpenResty is a full-fledged web application server built on top of Nginx, integrating Nginx with LuaJIT, whereas Nginx is a lightweight and high-performance web server and reverse proxy server.

  2. Extensibility: OpenResty provides extensive capabilities for dynamic content generation and processing through Lua scripting, allowing developers to extend Nginx functionality with custom Lua modules, whereas Nginx primarily relies on modules written in C for extensibility.

  3. Functionality: OpenResty offers advanced features such as dynamic content generation, request routing, authentication, caching, and content compression directly within the Nginx server, whereas Nginx focuses on serving static content, proxying requests, and load balancing.

  4. Ease of Use: OpenResty may have a steeper learning curve due to its Lua scripting integration and additional functionalities, making it more suitable for developers with Lua programming experience, while Nginx is relatively easier to configure and deploy for basic web server tasks.

  5. Performance: OpenResty can achieve high performance and efficiency for dynamic content generation and processing, especially when leveraging LuaJIT's just-in-time compilation capabilities, whereas Nginx excels in serving static content and handling high volumes of concurrent connections efficiently.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Nginx has a larger and more mature community and ecosystem, with extensive documentation, tutorials, and third-party modules available, whereas OpenResty has a smaller but growing community focused on Lua scripting and OpenResty-specific modules and applications.

In summary, OpenResty extends Nginx's capabilities with Lua scripting, offering advanced features for dynamic content generation and processing, while Nginx focuses on serving static content and proxying requests efficiently. Although OpenResty provides enhanced functionality, it may require a higher level of expertise in Lua programming, whereas Nginx remains a versatile and straightforward solution for many web server tasks.

Advice on NGINX and OpenResty

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!

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Replies (1)
Simon Aronsson
Developer Advocate at k6 / Load Impact · | 4 upvotes · 618.1K views
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.

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Needs advice
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server
and
NGINXNGINX

From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.

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Leandro Barral
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure

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Christian Cwienk
Software Developer at SAP · | 1 upvotes · 587.7K views
Recommends
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server

I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works

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Decisions about NGINX and OpenResty
Grant Steuart
  • Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
  • The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
  • The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
  • PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.
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Pros of NGINX
Pros of OpenResty
  • 1.4K
    High-performance http server
  • 893
    Performance
  • 730
    Easy to configure
  • 607
    Open source
  • 530
    Load balancer
  • 288
    Free
  • 288
    Scalability
  • 225
    Web server
  • 175
    Simplicity
  • 136
    Easy setup
  • 30
    Content caching
  • 21
    Web Accelerator
  • 15
    Capability
  • 14
    Fast
  • 12
    High-latency
  • 12
    Predictability
  • 8
    Reverse Proxy
  • 7
    The best of them
  • 7
    Supports http/2
  • 5
    Great Community
  • 5
    Lots of Modules
  • 5
    Enterprise version
  • 4
    High perfomance proxy server
  • 3
    Reversy Proxy
  • 3
    Streaming media delivery
  • 3
    Streaming media
  • 3
    Embedded Lua scripting
  • 2
    GRPC-Web
  • 2
    Blash
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Fast and easy to set up
  • 2
    Slim
  • 2
    saltstack
  • 1
    Virtual hosting
  • 1
    Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast
  • 1
    Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior
  • 1
    Ingress controller
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    Cons of NGINX
    Cons of OpenResty
    • 10
      Advanced features require subscription
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      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is 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.

      What is OpenResty?

      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.

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      What are some alternatives to NGINX and OpenResty?
      HAProxy
      HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
      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.
      Traefik
      A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.
      Caddy
      Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.
      Envoy
      Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
      See all alternatives