tengine

Tengine is a web server created by Taobao, Alibaba's e-commerce platform, and has been running at the core of some of the largest websites in the world, including taobao.com and tmall.com. It is built on top of Nginx, the widely used open-source web server, and is fully compatible with it. Anything that works with standard Nginx will work with Tengine, but Tengine adds a substantial set of extra capabilities on top.

One of the main additions is the ability to change server configuration without restarting. In standard Nginx, updating settings like routing rules or upstream server addresses requires reloading the server process. Tengine, through a companion project called tengine-ingress, lets you update these dynamically while the server keeps running. This includes routing traffic based on specific HTTP headers, cookies, or query parameters, adjusting timeouts, and enabling or disabling features on a per-server basis.

Tengine also supports HTTP/3, the newest version of the web's core protocol, which uses a faster connection method called QUIC. This is particularly useful for low-latency connections on unreliable networks. Additional features include better monitoring tools, Lua scripting for extending server behavior, proactive health checks on backend servers, automatic resource protection when the system is under load, and the ability to combine multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single download to speed up page loads.

Installing Tengine follows the same steps as building Nginx from source: configure, make, and install. The project is open source under the BSD-2-Clause license and has been maintained as a community project since 2011.