Nginx 1.20.0 Is Released
Nginx developer Maxim Dounin has announced a new stable release of the by-far most popular web server on the Internet with a brief change-log listing "1.20.x stable branch" as the only changes. There is a bit more to the latest Nginx 1.20.0 release than that.
written by 林慧 (Wai Lin) 2021-04-21 - last edited 2021-07-14. © CC BY
Servers.
Every website you visit is served by some kind of web server software. The Apache web server is still the kind of the kill and the go-to solution, it has dominated the web server market since 1995. Russian software engineer Igor Vladimirovich Sysoev released the first version of the BSD-licensed Nginx web server on October 4th, 2004. It gained a small user-base and went doggedly on in the Apache's shadow until it eventually overtook Apache in terms of total websites available on the Internet in April 2019.
Nginx served 415 million websites or 35.34% of all websites on the Internet in March 2021 according to Netcraft, beating Apache's share of 317 million websites by a fair margin.
Apache is still the king of serving active websites on the Internet with 50.5 million active websites served. Nginx comes in second with 40.1 million active websites. It is interesting note that Cloudflare comes in forth with 16.9 million websites behind it's content delivery network.
Nginx developer Maxim Dounin announced the release of Nginx 1.20 on April 20th with the cryptic message
"1.20.x stable branch."
There is a bit more to it than that.
The new Nginx verison supports Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) validation of client SSL certificates, the SSL reject_handshake and conf_command directives.
HTTP/2 support has been improved in a number of areas. The configuration supports a new keepalive_timeout, keepalive_request and lingering_close directives and the cookie_flags handling has been improved.
File caches can now be cleared dynamically when nginx is acting as a reverse proxy based on how much free space there is thanks to a new proxy_cache_path_max_size directive.
nginx 1.20.0 can be acquired from http://nginx.org/en/download.html. The nginx-1.20.0.tar.gz file is just 1.1 MiB and it is a really small and quick ./configure && make compile with very few dependencies - yet it is a really diverse and powerful web server capable of as good as everything you could or would want to do with a web server. The combination of pure C and Russian developers appears to be a good one.
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