Nginx Unit • Hacker News Board

Re: Nginx Unit

#21

Post by mmahemoff » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:23 AM UTC

Confusing description. After seeing the Github README (https://github.com/nginx/unit#integration-with-nginx), it looks to be Nginx's alternative to low-level, language-specific, app servers, e.g. PHP-FPM or Rack, with the benefit that a single Unit process can support multiple languages via its dynamic module architecture, similar to Nginx web server's dynamic modules.

It's still intended to run behind Nginx web server (or some other web server), much like you'd run something like PHP-FPM behind a web server.

Re: Nginx Unit

#22

Post by yeukhon » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:27 AM UTC

It is in beta, but I hope this won't become a commerical-only product.

Re: Nginx Unit

#23

Post by argsno » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:27 AM UTC

So, it's an application server?

Re: Nginx Unit

#24

Post by skrebbel » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:36 AM UTC

This looks pretty cool, and makes me sad that Mongrel2 never became popular. In short: Mongrel2 solves the same problem, but does it by letting your application handle requests and websocket connections over ZeroMQ instead of eg FastCGI.

I guess it lost momentum when ZeroMQ did. Anyone know why? Sounds like a dream solution in the current microservice hype.

http://mongrel2.org/

Re: Nginx Unit

#25

Post by unkown-unknowns » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:37 AM UTC

yeukhon wrote: post #22

It is in beta, but I hope this won't become a commerical-only product.

https://github.com/nginx/unit

It's open source at the moment at least and I think it's reasonable to expect at least that the parts that are open source today will remain so in the future. Certainly they could have a commercial version with extra features like they do with Nginx, but as long as they have a useful version of this Nginx Unit available open source I will be happy to use it.

Re: Nginx Unit

#26

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:38 AM UTC

I'm having a hard time seeing what niche this fills. It seems to be both a process manager and TCP proxy. What am I missing here? What makes this better than, for example, using docker-compose?

I think a "how it works" or "design doc" would be really helpful.

That said, the source files do make for pleasant reading. The nginx team has always set a strong example for what good C programming looks like.

EDIT: Their blog post [0] makes this more clear... nginx unit is one of four parts in their new "nginx application platform" [1]

[0] https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-nginx-application-pla...

[1] https://www.nginx.com/products/

Re: Nginx Unit

#27

Post by pilif » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:39 AM UTC

> It is not recommended to expose unsecure Unit API

why do people always use "not recommended" when they actually mean "do not ever do this or you'll end up the laughing stock in the tech press"

Exposing this otherwise awesome API to the public will amount to a free RCE for everybody. So not ever expose this to the public, not even behind some authentication.

It's very cool that by design it's only listening on a domain socket. Don't add a proxy in front of this.

Re: Nginx Unit

#28

Post by eeZah7Ux » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:41 AM UTC

[honest question, not being negative] what real use-case is not already being addressed by existing technologies?

Re: Nginx Unit

#29

Post by thanksgiving » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:41 AM UTC

drcongo wrote: post #20

drcongo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a webserver that proxies requests to a wsgi server. We tend to put Caddy in front of Gunicorn which works really well. Also, look into running Gunicorn under supervisord.

Oh, and also use Fabric - http://docs.fabfile.org/en/latest/

Thank you. I'll look this things up. Haven't had to do deployment stuff in my previous life

Re: Nginx Unit

#30

Post by thanksgiving » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 9:42 AM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #14

thanksgiving wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a small flask application which basically is a rest get post API server. I'm struggling to make deployment easy. With PHP, i just push to the application server and rsync that folder into var www html for Apache httpd but what would I do for flask python 3?

Here will go their REST config api to force reloads. BTW, it is a good idea to always do API versioning on production runs. That will eliminate the possibility that different API versions (files stuck in the cache, or simply people who kept browser open for a long time) use the same endpoint

Yes, I have a baseurl/v0/... in the naming scheme for now. (: