Tag: Nginx

Finally: Modern JavaScript in NGINX (and we can forget about LUA)

When I read the NGINX announcement about QuickJS support in njs, I couldn’t help but smile. Finally I can stop struggling with LUA.

As someone who has configured more NGINX servers than I can remember (from my time at Arrakis to now at Carto), I’ve always been annoyed by the limitation of having to use LUA for complex logic in NGINX. It’s not that LUA is bad, but… why learn another language when I already master JavaScript?

When installing/renewing let’s encrypt on a web server with nginx, we have to decide whether to do it with a temporary server, which means we must temporarily stop the web service, or indicate what the DocumentRoot of the web server is for the domain.

The latter implies that the website or service has a “public” DocumentRoot, and that’s not always easy when we’re using, for example, a Python, Java, or Go application and nginx as a proxy.

Having made the decision to only develop, in the case of PHP, for the 5.3 family or higher.