Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 201 posts

Re: Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

#51

Post by pydry »

eterps wrote: post #43
9dev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. My pet peeve are useless success fields. A 200 response tells you it was successful already. We can talk about a „message“ field or something if you intend to display it to a user, but even that should be implicit by being a response to a specific request. If I send a POST /configuration, is there really something new to be gained from that message that the client cannot figure out on its own? Wouldn’t, perhaps,…

Eric S. Raymond, in his guide "The Art of Unix Programming", mentions this principle as Rule of Silence: "When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing." His statement probably related to command line applications, but it makes sense for a lot of cases.

It sounds smart but what counts as surprising is entirely context dependent and most programs won't be aware of your context.

E.g. a command line app where you put a subtly wrong switch in that does exactly what it thought you wanted and prints nothing while outputting a 0 exit code is dangerous.

Re: Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

#54

Post by wolletd »

danappelxx wrote: post #10
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #7

Thought for a second that it included automatic TLS certificates but that is still done manually with Certbot, which also isn’t that difficult.

Not that difficult, but it’s still a separate dependency (with python requirements). If the goal here is a Caddy competitor, then IMO it’s missing the mark in terms of “one stop shop”. What’s the killer feature?

On the python requirements: I've always been satisfied with Bash implementations of ACME. I use dehydrated from the very beginning (when it was still called letsencrypt.sh) and lately started using acme.sh.

Re: Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

#55

Post by smarkov »

kijin wrote: post #13
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #7

Thought for a second that it included automatic TLS certificates but that is still done manually with Certbot, which also isn’t that difficult.

This thing will probably run in a bunch of VMs/containers behind a load balancer, so it's actually better that it doesn't try to obtain any certificates by default. Even a small number of apps trying to get their own certificates at the same time can exhaust the Let's Encrypt quota for your domain, with serious consequences to your other online properties.

> Even a small number of apps trying to get their own certificates at the same time can exhaust the Let's Encrypt quota for your domain

I got curious about this and decided to look it up, they actually have more restrictions than I expected[1]. Looks like to play it on the safe side you might be better off having a single server issuing certificates and distributing them where needed as well as using wildcards as much as possible. Interestingly, it looks like Google is doing just that since their certificate covers a very wide range of domains[2].

[1] https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/

[2] https://www.sslchecker.com/sslchecker?su=b39e88e1c4d3efcdb79...

Re: Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

#56

Post by coldtea »

jiggawatts wrote: post #37

This seems a lot more like how IIS works, unless I'm missing something? As an aside: it's always curious to see how the programming world has splintered into cliques that no longer hang out together. NGINX Unit is a "Universal" web server without support for C++, Rust, or ASP.NET! But PERL is supported, like the 1990s Linux cgi-bin world never went away.

In Linux where this is primarily expected to be used ASP.NET is extremely rare, as is C++ for web stuff, and Rust has a vanishingly small web presence still. Lots of people use Perl still though, if not for anything else, for legacy stuff.

So might as well ask why it doesn't support Delphi.

Re: Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

#58

Post by coldtea »

gjvc wrote: post #45
usrusr wrote: post #23

So much JSON... is that the real thing, as in comments are the gateway to hell, or is it actually some practical JSON superset like JSON5? I almost see myself jury-rigging some bespoke filesystem on-ramp to that REST configuration interface. Likely with at least half a dozen scary security compromises. Then on the other hand I guess they've never been afraid of getting called opinionated and that's certainly much bet…

JSON without comments is hell, forcing one to 1) convert JSON configuration to YAML. 2) add comments to YAML and admire it. 3) convert YAML to JSON for sending to the server.

YAML is an order of magnitude more hell...

Re: Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

#59

Post by usrusr »

gjvc wrote: post #45
usrusr wrote: post #23

So much JSON... is that the real thing, as in comments are the gateway to hell, or is it actually some practical JSON superset like JSON5? I almost see myself jury-rigging some bespoke filesystem on-ramp to that REST configuration interface. Likely with at least half a dozen scary security compromises. Then on the other hand I guess they've never been afraid of getting called opinionated and that's certainly much bet…

JSON without comments is hell, forcing one to 1) convert JSON configuration to YAML. 2) add comments to YAML and admire it. 3) convert YAML to JSON for sending to the server.

Fortunately it's only forcing one to convert to a JSON variant that does not forbid comments (starting as simple as wrapping the entire thing in console.log JSON.stringify). I'll happily leave the YAML authoring to YAML inventors, supposedly it makes them happy.

Re: Nginx Unit – Universal web app server

#60

Post by DarkCrusader2 »

> open source server project that works as a reverse proxy, serves static assets, and runs applications in multiple languages.

Isn't this what Nginx also does. How is Nginx Unit different beyond configuration via JSON REST APIs? The Github readme or their site is not very clear on this.

Post reply on HN