Get answers to questions about NGINX, features, updates, pricing, and more in our FAQs.
Please see the NGINX and NGINX Plus Feature Matrix.
NGINX Plus is convenient, fully supported by NGINX, Inc., and provides a range of advanced features.
The benefits of NGINX Plus depend on your organization’s current environment and requirements:
NGINX Open Source is appropriate when:
Companies who:
NGINX Plus is the same compact, software-only package for any supported Linux based system as NGINX open source. Packaged virtual appliances are available for Amazon AWS, and it is possible to deploy NGINX Plus within chroot jails, linux containers and your own virtual machine.
The standard NGINX Plus package contains just the NGINX-authored modules from the official open source build and the NGINX Plus extensions. Third-party modules, however, can be dynamically loaded into a running NGINX Plus instance. We build and maintain the most widely used third party modules, a full list of these modules is available here.
Custom or third-party modules not in the list above can also be loaded dynamically into a running NGINX Plus instance. For more details on how to do this, please see this blog post.
Please follow the instructions at: https://cs.nginx.com/repo_setup
You don’t have to re-install anything. You must replace the evaluation certificate with the production certificate, because the evaluation install of NGINX Plus will fail to start after the evaluation certificate has expired. You can get your production certificate from the MyF5 customer portal. Copy it to the /etc/ssl/nginx directory, replacing the evaluation certificate.
NGINX Plus includes a built‑in dashboard with detailed monitoring metrics, built on the NGINX Plus API. To see it in action, check out the live demo.
The NGINX Controller Load Balancing Module is a centralized platform for managing all of your NGINX Plus load balancers across a multi‑cloud environment. Using its intuitive wizard‑style GUI, you can configure all of your NGINX Plus instances. You can also build custom dashboards to track the metrics that are most important to you.
In addition, many monitoring vendors provide integrated solutions for NGINX Plus, including AppDynamics, Datadog, and Dynatrace. For a complete list of vendors, see our Partners page.
For more information, see the Live Activity Monitoring product page, the NGINX Plus Admin Guide, and the reference documentation for the NGINX Plus API module.
You can reload the NGINX configuration without any downtime, and without interrupting any current connections. A soft reconfiguration spawns a new set of NGINX worker processes, and the old ones continue to work until completion (but do not accept new requests – all new requests are accepted by the new set of worker processes). Live binary upgrades work in a similar fashion. If the upgrade is successful the old NGINX worker processes are signaled to terminate, and the new set takes over. For more information please see: Controlling NGINX
On-the-fly reconfiguration is used to modify load balancing parameters, and to add or remove servers from an upstream group. Please see: On-the-fly reconfiguration of NGINX Plus.
The list of the third‑party software which is part of the NGINX Plus builds (that is, compiled in) is in Appendix B of the NGINX Plus reference documentation, shipped with the product. NGINX Plus is also linked against the following third‑party libraries using dynamic linking; we do NOT ship this software with NGINX Plus:
NGINX Plus is also “SSL‑aware”, but we do NOT ship/distribute OpenSSL library ourselves in any form.
All NGINX instances that are part of an active subscription are required to report commercial usage telemetry to F5. Refer here for details.
Follow the login instruction in the welcome email we’ve sent you. After you’ve logged in and retrieved the necessary access keys, follow the installation instructions in the NGINX Plus Admin Guide. (This link is also included in the welcome email.)
Installing NGINX Plus might change the behavior of your NGINX server if you are using any third‑party modules compiled from source, because NGINX Plus is distributed as a binary with a predetermined set of modules built in (listed in the NGINX Plus Technical Specifications). You can, however, load third‑party modules dynamically into NGINX Plus at runtime. We recommend checking for any feature differences between your current version of NGINX and the current NGINX Plus release before upgrading.
The way you perform the NGINX Plus installation depends on your current deployment. We recommend that before any NGINX or NGINX Plus upgrade, you always back up your existing NGINX configuration files.
It’s easy to migrate to using dynamic modules with NGINX Plus. To install and dynamically load modules, perform the following steps.
They assume that you have configured your package management tool to retrieve files from NGINX rather than the OS vendor’s distribution. The following commands are appropriate for Debian-based systems.
Use your operating system’s standard package management tool to remove the nginx‑plus‑extras image and install the base nginx-plus image.
# apt-get update
# apt-get remove nginx-plus-extras
# apt-get install nginx-plus
Install the modules you want to load dynamically (repeat the installation command for each module).
# apt-get install module-name
The dynamically loadable modules are:
Note that some modules are not available for certain OS versions because of OS limitations. For details as well as descriptions of the modules, see the NGINX Plus Technical Specifications.
The /etc/nginx/modules directory is created automatically with symbolic links to the installed locations of the .so files for the selected modules.
In the main (top-level) context in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, add a load_module directive for each dynamically loadable module you installed.
load_module modules/module-name.so;
Check the new configuration for syntactic validity and reload NGINX Plus.
# nginx -t && nginx -s reload
Load‑balancing algorithms function better in NGINX Plus due to cross‑core synchronization, multiple session persistence methods to fine‑tune load balancing decisions, health checks to better identify failed servers, and slow‑start to reintroduce them. For more information please see: Application Load Balancing with NGINX Plus
NGINX Plus currently supports the following load-balancing methods:
Session persistence methods can identify user sessions and pin their traffic to the appropriate upstream, overriding the load-balancing decision:
For more information, see Application Load Balancing with NGINX Plus
Yes, it does. We have support for cookie-insert, variable-based routing and learn session persistence. Please see: Application Load Balancing with NGINX Plus
We support load balancing for HTTP/HTTPS/FastCGI/uwsgi/SCGI/memcache only. We proxy and route SMTP/POP3/IMAP traffic to a single upstream rather than load-balancing it.
Please see: Application Health Checks with NGINX Plus
NGINX Plus does indeed include an extremely scalable caching engine for both static and dynamic content. Caching is supported for all proxy-modes/protocols, such as HTTP/FastCGI/uwsgi/SCGI. Cached content is stored in a hybrid cache – hot content is stored in memory, and all content is stored on an on-disk cache that persists across software restarts and reboots. For more information please see: Content Caching with NGINX Plus
Yes, NGINX Plus supports full cache invalidation based on either a specific URL, or a wildcard match. Please see: Content Caching with NGINX Plus
Please see: Streaming Media delivery using NGINX Plus.
NGINX Plus includes award-winning support from NGINX engineers, plus exclusive features not available in NGINX Open Source, including active health checks, session persistence, JWT authentication, and more.
For details, check out the full comparison of NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source features.
NGINX Plus is our commercial offering, with technical support and expanded features developed for the enterprise. As someone familiar with NGINX, you’ll be able to hit the ground running and delve into new features like advanced load balancing, configuration and cache management APIs, session persistence, and application‑aware health checks, to name a few.
NGINX F/OSS is updated approximately monthly, on a time-based release program. If you receive NGINX updates from a third party such as an operating system vendor, they may not issue releases as frequently and some vendors track the stable (i.e. legacy) branch rather than mainline (i.e. current) branch. Updates are announced to the nginx-announce@nginx.org mailing list.
NGINX Plus is released approximately quarterly; check the NGINX Plus release details. Updates are sent to all registered users of NGINX Plus.
For details on the software release process, please check out the article NGINX 1.6 and 1.7 released.
We send security notifications to:
Installing NGINX Plus might change the behavior of your NGINX server if you are using any third‑party modules compiled from source, because NGINX Plus is distributed as a binary with a predetermined set of modules built in (listed in the NGINX Plus Technical Specifications). You can, however, load third‑party modules dynamically into NGINX Plus at runtime. We recommend checking for any feature differences between your current version of NGINX and the current NGINX Plus release before upgrading.
The way you perform the NGINX Plus installation depends on your current deployment. We recommend that before any NGINX or NGINX Plus upgrade, you always back up your existing NGINX configuration files.
Notifications of new releases and critical security updates are emailed to registered administrators on our Customer Support portal. Notifications are only sent to users with the admin role – basic and billing users do not receive these notifications.
We announce every NGINX Plus release on our blog, and you can find details about every release on the NGINX Plus Releases page. Users of NGINX Amplify can also find version and security advisory information in their system reports.
The text below should be added to your license conditions, followed by the text of the applicable 2-clause BSD license.
This product contains software provided by NGINX and its contributors.
Also, if your build of nginx includes any of the following third‑party products – zlib, PCRE, OpenSSL – it’s worth including their copyright acknowledgements and disclaimers as well.
NGINX Plus is sold as a software subscription. For more details, please see the NGINX pricing page.
NGINX products are licensed “per instance”. Each subscription allows you to run one single instance of the software for the subscription period.
An instance is a single copy of the software running on a single physical or virtual server. If you run two copies of the software on the same physical or virtual server, that counts as two instances. When you run two copies of the software on two different physical or virtual servers, that also counts as two instances. Most disaster‑recovery (DR) deployments require two instances per location, even if one instance is “passive” (running but not receiving traffic).
If you run a “hot/cold” DR deployment where one server is powered down (that is, the NGINX software is not running), and powers up only when the primary server fails, then you only need one subscription because only one copy of the software is running at any given time.
There are no other limitations. The software will run at full performance making optimal use of the hardware resources available, and there are no limitations on the size or sophistication of the configuration.
Please describe your requirements in more detail and we’ll do our best to find a solution for you.
There are no configuration limits for virtual host multi-tenancy, or the number of SSL certificates. The maximum number of configuration objects depends on the server’s RAM.
The most common use scenarios for NGINX Plus are:
Yes, you most certainly can! In fact NGINX has been a preferred proxy/frontend for Node.js for many years now. Please check the following article describing the use of NGINX Plus and WebSocket protocol: NGINX as a WebSockets Proxy or search for the many third-party articles available.
Yes, you can. NGINX Plus is based on the open source NGINX software, used by over 35% of all websites on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We offer both NGINX AMIs (for Amazon Linux and for Ubuntu) and a standalone (BYOL-like) subscription that you can use on top of your own AMIs or VMs. The product links on AWS Marketplace are:
[Editor: As of 2015, two additional AMIs are available:
There is also a “trial” mode now on AWS Marketplace! For more information please see: Getting Started with NGINX Plus on Amazon EC2.
Yes, in most cases you can safely use NGINX Plus as an alternative to Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), especially if you require highly granular, configurable request routing, precise logging, SSL termination, caching and connections/bandwidth management – all closer to, and nicely integrated with your applications. NGINX Plus can also be used between ELB and your backend servers.
To some extent you can. Bear in mind that CloudFront is a hugely distributed architecture, encompassing thousands of edge nodes around the world. Feature-wise, NGINX Plus can be a very powerful edge-caching solution.
NGINX can be used to proxy streaming media when the streaming media functions are handled by the backend server, which could be NGINX, but the NGINX Plus streaming media extensions are for streaming the content from directly attached storage only. Another method of video content ingest is via RTMP.
Yes, NGINX Plus is a very popular solution for HTTP video distribution, and a great, high-performance, highly scalable, extremely cost-efficient alternative to Wowza or Adobe products.
NGINX Plus is renowned as a web acceleration solution. If your systems (ERP/CRM/E-Commerce/etc.) use HTTP as the communication protocol, NGINX Plus can employ a range of optimizations to reduce unnecessary load on your application backends, improve high availability, reduce latency and contribute to overall higher performance. NGINX Plus introduces the following acceleration techniques to your application stack:
NGINX is a well known open source project originally written by Igor Sysoev, a Russian engineer. Igor started the project in 2002 and made it public in 2004. Since that time NGINX has become a de‑facto standard for high‑performance, scalable websites. Tens of millions of active websites use NGINX, including 1 million busiest websites in the world. Companies like Airbnb, Box, Dropbox, Netflix, Tumblr, WordPress.com, and many others deploy NGINX for scalability and performance reasons.
NGINX is a high‑performance, highly scalable, highly available web server, reverse proxy server, and web accelerator (combining the features of an HTTP load balancer, content cache, and more). NGINX offers a highly scalable architecture that is very different from that of Apache (and many other open source and commercial products in the same category). NGINX has a modular, event‑driven, asynchronous, single-threaded architecture that scales extremely well on generic server hardware and across multi-processor systems. NGINX uses all of the underlying power of modern operating systems like Linux to optimize the usage of memory, CPU, and network, and extract the maximum performance out of a physical or virtual server. The end result is that NGINX can often serve at least 10x more (and often 100–1000x more) requests per server compared to Apache – that means more connected users per server, better bandwidth utilization, less CPU and RAM consumed, and a greener environment too!
For more information about the NGINX architecture please refer to a chapter dedicated to NGINX in the “Architecture of Open Source Applications” book.
Yes, you can. Traditional ADCs and Load Balancers are deployed at the front of an application, to load-balance, persist, cache, route and modify transactions. NGINX Plus provides the same functionality and benefits. ADCs and load balancers operate as reverse proxies, forwarding HTTP requests on to origin servers and application servers. NGINX Plus can operate as an origin server (serving static content directly from disk) and as an application gateway (translating HTTP requests to interface protocols such as FastCGI, uWSGI, memcache) – it provides all the functionality you would expect from a modern web server. NGINX Plus is a proven solution (based on the highly-regarded NGINX Open Source core), creating a full HTTP-driven application platform. You may also check the following articles on nginx.com:
It is certainly possible to use NGINX Plus as an alternative to HAProxy for HTTP load balancing. NGINX Plus is a full fledged web acceleration solution that includes HTTP request routing, HTTP load balancing, scalable content caching, SSL termination, bandwidth management, monitoring and more.
It is certainly possible to use NGINX Plus as an alternative to Varnish. NGINX Plus is a full fledged web acceleration solution that includes HTTP request routing, HTTP load balancing, scalable content caching, SSL termination, bandwidth management, monitoring and more.
NGINX, Inc. offers a diverse set of professional services on top of NGINX Plus, including tuning, configuration, performance optimization, configuration auditing, load simulation, and dedicated technical account management. Professional services cover planning, installation & optimization for NGINX Plus, as well as optimization and tuning of the related operating system settings (when/if applicable). Professional services do not include installation/configuration of any other 3rd party software (e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Magento etc.).
We will typically have a detailed email exchange, or a phone call to outline and define the scope of services first. We then estimate the number of professional services hours required. When both the customer and the NGINX, Inc. representative have signed off on the scope of services, the work commences. Our professional services engineering team keeps track of the hours spent, and tracks them against the purchased amount of hours, notifying the customer regularly (after every major phase).
Yes, it is, provided we can define a clear scope for this project and agree on the professional services required (timeframe/costs/etc.).
Yes, we’ve done quite a bit of such work for a variety of customers.
You can purchase an NGINX Plus subscription to cover each supported instance of NGINX Plus or open source NGINX.
NGINX supports binary builds of NGINX Open Source that are obtained from the nginx.org repositories. Purchase a Basic, Professional, or Enterprise support subscription for each NGINX Open Source instance that requires support, and use a prebuilt NGINX Open Source binary instead of an NGINX Plus binary. NGINX does not support binaries that you build from source yourself or binary distributions obtained from other sources.
You can also get support from other NGINX community members.
To create a support ticket, please follow the steps shown at NGINX support.
If you need help with architecture, design, or configuration of NGINX, NGINX Plus, and microservices applications, our Professional Services team can help you translate your requirements into an optimized solution. Please contact us to learn more.
We advise users to run the most recent release of NGINX software, because we issue updates to the most recent release only. We proactively notify all subscribers when updates are available. We provide technical support for the current release, and releases that launched within two years of the date of the current release. For release information, please see the release notes for NGINX Plus, NGINX App Protect, and the NGINX Ingress Controller based on NGINX Plus.
After your support contract expires, you are no longer licensed to use NGINX Plus or obtain support from NGINX. You cannot access NGINX Plus updates, and you must stop and delete your NGINX Plus instances. Please contact us to renew your NGINX Plus subscription.
Here are just some of the benefits you gain from the commercial support included with your NGINX Plus subscription:
NGINX is happy to provide best‑effort support to customers with Professional and Enterprise subscriptions for the optional third‑party modules that we build and maintain. A list of these modules is available on our Dynamic Modules page. Support coverage may be limited to one hour per query, after which you can engage NGINX Professional Services if you wish.
Custom or third‑party modules that are not listed on the Dynamic Modules page are not covered by support. We may ask for any such modules to be disabled before providing support, in order to verify that the issue is with NGINX Plus itself.
We offer three levels of support for NGINX Plus. For Enterprise‑level subscribers, NGINX guarantees an SLA of 30 minutes for the initial contact in new support queries. We offer service credits in the event that we fail to meet an SLA. Please contact us to learn more.
Our support covers debugging and troubleshooting of problems you have installing or operating your NGINX Plus deployment. This includes:
Our support does not cover:
Follow the login instruction in the welcome email we’ve sent you. After you’ve logged in and retrieved the necessary access keys, follow the installation instructions in the NGINX Plus Admin Guide. (This link is also included in the welcome email.)