NGINX Unit
v. 1.28.0

About§

NGINX Unit is a polyglot app server, a reverse proxy, and a static file server, available for UNIX-like systems. It was built by nginx team members from scratch to be highly efficient and fully configurable at runtime.

The latest version is 1.28.0, released on September 13, 2022.
See the changelog here or subscribe to our RSS feed; a GitHub-based roadmap outlines our next plans.
The sources are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Commercial support is available from NGINX, Inc.

Key Features§

Flexibility§

Performance§

  • Requests are asynchronously processed in threads with efficient event loops (epoll, kqueue)
  • Syscalls and data copy operations are kept to a necessary minimum
  • 10,000 inactive HTTP keep-alive connections take up only a few MBs of memory
  • Router and app processes rely on low-latency IPC built with lock-free queues over shared memory
  • Built-in statistics provide insights into Unit’s performance
  • The number of per-app processes is defined statically or scales preemptively within given limits
  • App and instance usage statistics are collected and exposed via the API
  • Multithreaded request processing is supported for Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby apps

Security & Robustness§

  • Client connections are handled by a separate non-privileged router process
  • Low-resource conditions (out of memory or descriptors) and app crashes are handled gracefully
  • SSL/TLS with SNI, session cache and tickets is integrated (OpenSSL 1.0.1 and later)
  • Different apps are isolated in separate processes
  • Apps can be additionally containerized with namespace and file system isolation
  • Static file serving benefits from chrooting, symlink and mount point traversal restrictions

Supported App Languages§

Unit interoperates with:

Reporting Issues§

Please report any security-related issues concerning Unit to security-alert@nginx.org. For our mutual convenience, specifically mention NGINX Unit in the subject and follow the CVSS v3.1 specification.

With other issue types, please refer to Troubleshooting for guidance.

Demo§