nginx is creating a name and market for itself as a reverse proxy, even though there are better solutions for reverse-proxies out there, everything from HAProxy to Apache Traffic Server to even Apache httpd. But this is an important market to have. Why? Because it allows for the perception that the "web runs on nginx" simply because all you see are the nginx web proxies and nothing behind that. So what are the server…
> So what are the servers behind nginx? 9 times out of 10 it is Apache httpd, and numerous instances of it at that. Can you cite a source for this? In my practice, the servers behind nginx are usually platform-specific application servers, such as Gunicorn or uWSGI for Python.
Popular PHP CMS software also relies on .htaccess. Wordpress for example allegedly powers about a quarter of all websites, and auto-creates an .htaccess file when you enable pretty links, which basically everyone does. Drupal ships with multiple .htaccess files.
Sure it's possible to adapt this code into Nginx configuration, but there is really no reason to do that. It's far easier to set up Nginx in front of Apache and get most of the Nginx benefits that way.