Nginx ("eNgine x") is a lightweight, high-performance HTTP server, reverse proxy, TCP stream proxy and mail proxy, released under a BSD-like license.
Nginx is a web server and mail proxy known for its high performance and small resource footprint. It is used in many places as a replacement to Apache and also as a front end server to static content or reverse proxying. Nginx is developed under a BSD-like license by Kazakhstani developer Igor Sysoev.
Nginx comes with diverse modules that enable it to perform various different tasks such as load balancing, URL rewriting, request rate limiting, content compression, raw TCP proxying and integration with tools like memcached
or scripting languages like Lua
.
Nginx is being used by some of the worlds busiest sites like WordPress, Sourceforge, Github and Reddit. Its market share has been raising from 7% in 2008 to over 30% as of June 2016 according to W3techs statistics.
After nine years of development, Nginx 1.0 stable was released on April 2011.