NGINX Plus Technical Specifications

NGINX Plus is available in binary form only; it is not available in source form.
Please inquire for additional platforms and modules.

Supported Distributions

12.04 LTS (i386, x86_64)
14.04 LTS (i386, x86_64, aarch64)
16.04 LTS (i386, x86_64, ppc64le)

Platform Limitations
12.04 LTS: nginx-plus-module-modsecurity not available
16.04 LTS: nginx-plus-module-modsecurity not available on ppc64le platforms

CentOS
5.10+, 6.5+ (i386, x86_64)
7.0+ (x86_64)

Platform Limitations
5.10+: nginx-plus-extras, nginx-plus-module-modsecurity, and nginx-plus-module-passenger not available; HTTP/2 not supported by OS OpenSSL library
6.5+: nginx-plus-module-modsecurity not available; see this advisory when upgrading to version 6.6

9.3, 10.1+ (amd64)

Platform Limitations
9.3: nginx-plus-module-modsecurity not available

5.10+, 6.5+ (i386, x86_64)
7.0+ (x86_64)

Platform Limitations
5.10+: nginx-plus-extras, nginx-plus-module-modsecurity, and nginx-plus-module-passenger not available; HTTP/2 not supported by OS OpenSSL library
6.5+: nginx-plus-module-modsecurity not available; see this advisory when upgrading to version 6.6

Red Hat
5.10+, 6.5+ (i386, x86_64)
7.0+ (x86_64, ppc64le)

Platform Limitations
5.10+: nginx-plus-extras, nginx-plus-module-modsecurity, and nginx-plus-module-passenger not available; HTTP/2 not supported by OS OpenSSL library
6.5+: nginx-plus-module-modsecurity not available; see this advisory when upgrading to version 6.6

7.0, 8.0 (i386, x86_64)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
12, 12 SP1 (x86_64)

2016.03+ (x86_64)

Supported Deployment Environments

Hardware

Virtual Machine or Container

Cloud

NGINX Plus Features

A complete set of web serving, proxying, acceleration, and load-balancing capabilities for HTTP-based, TCP-based, and UDP-based services. A complete list of NGINX Plus feature releases can be found in our Admin Guide.

Protocols and Performance

HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTPS, WebSocket
IMAP, POP3, SMTP with HTTPS and external HTTP-based authentication
IPv4 and IPv6
1 million concurrent connections
10,000+ virtual servers multi-tenancy
Connection multiplexing pools for low-latency communications

Load Balancing

Full Layer 7 reverse proxy
Load balancing of HTTP traffic, including HTTP, HTTPS, FastCGI, memcached, SCGI, uWSGI
Load balancing of TCP traffic
Load balancing of UDP traffic
URL/URI content-based request routing
Reverse proxy and load balancer with choice of algorithms (Round Robin, Hash, IP Hash, Least Connections, Least Time)
Session persistence with cookie-insert, session-learn, and defined-route methods
Session draining for easy maintenance
Health monitoring of backend applications with synthetic transactions and slow start

High Availability

Active-standby clusters using VRRP (keepalived)
Live binary upgrades to eliminate downtime
Graceful restart with non-stop request processing

Security

Bandwidth, connection, and request policing for HTTP and TCP services
Protocol isolation and request filtering
Header scrubbing and manipulation
IP-based access control lists (ACLs)
Proxying requests with NTLM authentication
ModSecurity WAF available as dynamically loadable module at additional cost
Native support for JSON Web Token (JWT)

Edge Cache and Origin Server

Content offload and caching
Lightweight cache revalidation
Support for Vary field in HTTP header to control caching
Serving of cached (stale) content when origin server fails
On-the-fly content compression and optimization
Segmenting large files into byte ranges, for more efficient caching
HTTP video streaming with support for FLV, HDS, HLS, and MP4 formats

SSL/TLS Processing

SSL, SNI, TLSv1.1, and TLSv1.2
Support for RSA, DSA, ECC, and Perfect Forward Secrecy key exchange
Client and server-side certificate validation for client-side and upstream-side connections
OCSP stapling
Support for "dual-stack" ECC and RSA certificates for same domain

Logging, Monitoring, and Configuration

On-the-fly reconfiguration of upstream server pools, with changes optionally persistent across restarts and configuration reloads
Live activity monitoring
GeoIP configuration decisions
Logging of HTTP transactions locally or to syslog

Additional Features

High-performance load balancing
Intelligent session persistence
Application-aware health checks
Massively-scalable content caching
Sophisticated streaming media delivery
Advanced live activity monitoring
DevOps on-the-fly reconfiguration

Recommended Hardware

NGINX Plus was designed and optimized for use on generic server hardware. For an edge server capable of serving 3 to 6 Gbps of live traffic and 20,000 to 50,000 requests per second, we commonly recommend the following:

2 modern x86_64 CPUs with 4 to 8 cores per CPU
16 to 32 GB RAM
6 x 250-GB SSD drives (if required for cache and storage)
10-GbE Intel networking card

Packages

nginx-plus – Standard open source NGINX modules and additional NGINX Plus features (see the Modules in the NGINX Plus Package section below). Supports HTTP/2.
nginx-plus-extras: NGINX Plus with additional modules: GeoIP, Headers-More, Image Filter, Lua, Phusion Passenger, Perl, RTMP, Set-Misc, and XSLT; also the Lua library for the Redis client driver. Supports HTTP/2.

For details about these modules, see the NGINX Plus Dynamic Modules section below. Note that not all dynamic modules listed there are built into the nginx‑plus‑extras package.

Note – NGINX Plus R10 is the last release that will include the nginx‑plus‑extras package. We strongly recommend that you modify your installation and configuration procedures now to use the nginx‑plus package and dynamically load the modules in the nginx‑plus‑extras package that you actually use. Starting in NGINX Plus R11, this will be the only possible way to use modules that are not built into the nginx‑plus package.

Modules in the NGINX Plus Package

Core

Core – Control basic functioning (mutexes, events, thread pools, workers, and so on)

HTTP Core

HTTP Core – Process HTTP traffic
Addition – Prepend and append data to a response
Auto Index – Generate directory listings
Charset – Add character set in Content-Type field of HTTP response header, and define or convert between character sets
Empty GIF – Generate empty image response
Gzip – Use GZIP to compress HTTP responses
Gzip Static – Serve pre-compressed files from disk
Gunzip – Decompress responses for clients that don’t support compression
Headers – Add fields to HTTP response headers, including Cache-Control and Expires
Index – Specify index files used in directory requests
Random Index – Select random index file for directory request
Real IP – Determine true origin IP address for proxied traffic
SSI – Process Server Side Includes (SSI) commands
User ID – Set cookies that uniquely identify clients
WebDAV – Implement WebDAV file management

HTTP Access Control and Authentication

Access – Control access based on client IP address (support access control lists [ACLs])
Auth Basic – Implement HTTP Basic Authentication scheme
Auth JWT – Validate JSON Web Tokens
Auth Request – Determine client authorization using subrequests to external authentication server
Referer – Control access based on Referer field in HTTP request header
Secure Link – Process encrypted, time-limited links to content

HTTP Advanced Configuration

Browser – Create variables based on User-Agent field in HTTP request header
Cache Slice – Create byte-range segments of large files, for more efficient caching
Geo – Create variables based on client IP address
Map – Create variables based on other variables in requests
Rewrite – Test and change URI of request
Split Clients – Partition clients for A/B testing
Sub – Replace text string in response (rewrite content)

HTTP Logging and Monitoring

Log – Log HTTP transactions locally or to syslog
Status – Implement live activity monitoring

HTTP Media Delivery

F4F – Stream HDS (Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming; filename extensions .f4f, .f4m, .f4x)
FLV – Stream FLV (Flash Video; filename extension .flv)
HLS – Stream HLS (Apple HTTP Live Streaming; filename extensions .m3u8, .ts) dynamically generated from MP4 or MOV (filename extensions .m4a, .m4v, .mov, .mp4, and .qt)
MP4 – Stream MP4 (filename extensions .m4a, .m4v, .mp4)
Streaming of RTMP and DASH is provided by the third-party RTMP module in the NGINX Plus Extras package

HTTP Proxying and APIs

FastCGI – Proxy and cache requests to FastCGI application
Memcached – Proxy requests to memcached application
Proxy – Proxy and cache requests to HTTP server
SCGI – Proxy and cache requests to SCGI server
Upstream – Proxy and cache requests to load-balanced pools of application servers
uWSGI – Proxy and cache requests to uWSGI server

HTTP Transaction Shaping

Limit Connections – Limit concurrent connections from a client IP address or other keyed value
Limit Requests – Limit rate of request processing for a client IP address or other keyed value
Limit Responses – Limit rate of responses per client connection

HTTP/2 and SSL/TLS

HTTP/2 – Process HTTP/2 traffic
SSL/TLS – Process HTTPS traffic

Mail

Mail Core – Proxy mail traffic
Auth HTTP – Offload authentication processing from HTTP server
IMAP – Implement capabilities and authentication methods for IMAP
POP3 – Implement authentication methods for POP3 traffic
Proxy – Support proxy-related parameters for mail protocols
SMTP – Define accepted SASL authentication methods for SMTP clients
SSL/TLS – Implement SSL, STARTTLS, and TLS for mail protocols

TCP and UDP Load Balancing

Stream – Process TCP and UDP traffic
Access – Support IP-based access control lists (ACLs)
Geo – Create variables based on client IP address
Limit Conn – Limit concurrent connections by key
Map – Create variables based on other variables in requests
Split Clients – Partition clients for A/B testing
SSL/TLS – Process TCP traffic secured with SSL/TLS
Upstream – Proxy and cache requests to load-balanced pools of servers

NGINX Plus Dynamic Modules

GeoIP

GeoIP (nginx-plus-module-geoip) – Create variables based on the client IP address, using the precompiled MaxMind databases, for both HTTP and TCP/UDP traffic

Headers-More

Headers-More (nginx-plus-module-headers-more) – Set and clear input and output headers (third-party extension to NGINX core Headers module)

Image-Filter

Image-Filter (nginx-plus-module-image-filter) – Transform JPEG, GIF, and PNG images (for example, crop, resize, or rotate them)

Lua

Lua (nginx-plus-module-lua) – Integrate Lua coroutines into the NGINX event processing model (third-party extension)

ModSecurity

ModSecurity (nginx-plus-module-modsecurity) – Implement web application firewall

nginScript

nginScript (nginx-plus-module-njs) – Integrate JavaScript code into the NGINX event processing model for HTTP and Stream modules

Perl

Perl (nginx-plus-module-perl) – Implement location and variable handlers in Perl, and insert Perl calls into Server Side Includes (SSI)

Phusion Passenger Open Source

Phusion Passenger Open Source (nginx-plus-module-passenger) – Deploy and administer applications written in Node.js, Python, and Ruby

RTMP Media Streaming

RTMP (nginx-plus-module-rtmp) – Stream Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) [third-party extension]

Set-Misc

Set-Misc (nginx-plus-module-set-misc) – Implement numerous additional set_* directives (third-party extension to NGINX core Rewrite module)

XSLT

XSLT (nginx-plus-module-xslt) – Transform XML responses using one or more XSLT stylesheets