Counter question: Why does everyone call it “engine X” and not “enjinx”, which would be the way cooler pronunciation?

Honest question: why not use nginx?

I have run it in so many different scenarios, both professionally and personally, its crazy. Nginx has never failed me, literally. My homeserver is quite limited but nginx has a very small footprint, it performs beautifully well and it satisfies all my hosting, proxying, redirecting and streaming needs.

It works for modern and legacy applications, custom code, webhosting, supports all the modern features and its configuration is very easy with literal thousandsof examples available online.

Apache probably can do all that but I hate how unintuitive its configuration is to me personally. HAproxy cant do half the stuff nginx does.

As for caddy Ive heard of it but never really used it. What does it offer that nginx doesnt?

HAproxy cannot serve static files directly. You need a webserver behind it for that.

Apache is slow.

Nginx is both a capable, fast reverse-proxy, and a capable, fast webserver. It can do everything HAproxy does, and what Apache does, and more.

I am not saying it is absolutely best for every use-case, but this flexibility is a large part of why I use it in my infra (nad have been using it for a decade).

When NGINX showed up it beat the then dominant apache on resource utilzation hands-down.

It’s also very configurable and has a lot of modules, both in-house and third party.

The only downside for me: as of late the whole commercial part of the project has been gobbling up everything to shove the non-free version to the point where it’s hard to find info on the free version, e.g., the wiki page that lists all the third-party modules. The nginxtutorials site seems to be a good resource.

Btw one of the main devs forked it into freenginx:

Dounin writes in his announcement that “new non-technical management” at F5 “recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects. In particular, they decided to interfere with security policy nginx uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers’ position.” While it was “quite understandable,” given their ownership, Dounin wrote that it means he was “no longer able to control which changes are made in nginx,” hence his departure and fork.

Also, fun fact: this is probably the only instance of russian software muricans don’t cry Commie! all the time (maybe because the parent company was acquired).

I think a large factor is because so many people use it. A lot of people come to self hosting without much knowledge and just copy configs etc. from a Tutorial. Those tutorials will 90% of the time use Apache or nginx. I remember back when I set up my first servers I mostly followed instructions and copied configs. Years later I understood I had set up Apache with virtual hosts and what that means/how it works but it might as well just have been nginx.

As for why so many people use these two I think it also has to do with “adoption” in another way. Back before nginx Apache was the standard everything else was “different”. Then nginx appeared to solve the Problems of Apache and then there were 2 … These days you can probably do anything you want/need with the 2 servers so no reason to use anything else.

Professionaly I usually use either HAProxy and Apache or Nginx (or sometimes HAProxy and Nginx) but if there are special requirements that might change.

It’s easy to use, reliable, and doubles as a webserver so I only need one software to host my websites and also do the reverse proxying to the other webservices.

Because everyone told me to

• simple config & setup
• good performance
• popular/packaged by every single distro
• just works

Back when Nginx started, Apache was the only alternative and a big pain in the ass. That’s how it became popular.

Because Nginx Proxy Manager exists.

And also because for me it started from web hosting where Apache and Nginx dominate and later because of many easy to understand example configs from the net including many “docker letsencrypt” examples.

Some good answers in here already. It boils down to a couple points for me:

• Back when I started selfhosting, it was either nginx or apache, and I found nginx better and easier to set up
• All the nginx knowledge I learned years ago still works just the same as it did back then, so why potentially mess things up by switching if it all still works
• Basically every project has an example nginx config for reference, that can’t be said about other proxies
• It is easier to find support online for edge cases that might pop up with nginx due to the ubiquity of its use and years of history

nginx has more features and flexibility than haproxy, such as being a web server. If I wanted just a pure proxy, I’d use haproxy. Apache is primarily a web server, and a pain to configure.

Personally I use Traefik. Add it to docker-compose, set up LE certs, add a few lines to each container, and it Just Works. No extra config on Traefik itself.

nginx is mature and has a lot of support online. A lot of server projects assume you’re using nginx, as well. I’ve only ever seen caddy instructions on newer projects and even then, they usually also have nginx instructions.

Plus, I already know how to use it.

Security

Caddy is good but it tried to do to much. This means that security bugs could be way more common. It has been audited by outside people and the issues they found were fixed but I am will very doubtful that it is secure yet

@selfhosted @Findmysec what is the problem with nginx? 🤔