this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Does nginx give me anything over apache httpd in the year of our lord 2024? I've used both for hosting servers but never really understood the difference, as apache seems to have incorporated the important improvements that nginx made iirc.
Using both, too.
Supposedly NGINX gives you better peak performance and the configuration file format is more popular.
I would guess that peak performance is only a concern when being google/netflix/amazon, otherwise I would bet the bottleneck is somewhere else.
Further, NGINX seems to have become the default reverse proxy for all start ups, companies etc. around 10 years ago and thanks to group thinking by now one has to explain when using something else than NGINX.
What I really miss from Apache is Apaches awesome letsencrypt module w/o the need for certbot. (If somebody knows about a module for NGINX which takes care of letsencrypt w/o certbot, please enlighten me.)
In summary: Technical Apache and NGINX are IMHO mostly interchangeable (outside of peek performance demands), but the market/herd/group think prefers NGINX.
Sorry, but you don’t get to claim groupthink while ignoring state of Apache when Nginx got released.
Apache was a mess of modules with confusing documentation, an arsenal of foot guns, and generally a PITA to deal with. Nginx was simpler, more performant, and didn’t have the extra complexity that Apache was failing to manage.
My personal first encounter was about hosting PHP applications in a multiuser environment, and god damn was nginx a better tool.
Apache caught up in a few years, but by then people were already solving different problems. Would nginx arrive merely a year later, it would get lost to history, but it arrived exactly when everyone was fed up with Apache just the right amount.
Nowadays, when people choose a web server, they choose one they are comfortable with. With both httpds being mature, that’s the strongest objective factor to influence the choice. It’s not groupthink, it’s a consequence of concrete events.
Does Apache have something like nginx's OpenResty? That may be a significant benefit too.
Maybe mod_lua is an equivalent? I haven't used OpenResty so there may be something I'm missing.
It looks to be similar. I'm not sure how trivial it is to add this. For nginx it's basically built in. You just give it the Lua code. It's also pretty capable. You can basically write a whole API back-end in it, which is pretty good for small APIs or functionalities, like an image resizing API.