Phusion Blog

I probably don’t need to tell you what a great web server Nginx is. It’s lightweight, it’s fast, it’s scalable, and many people like it for its configuration file syntax yet flexible features. It’s no surprise that Nginx is doing a great job serving as a core for Phusion Passenger Standalone (our Ruby/Rails web application server which supports Apache and Nginx).

Nginx’s development has traditionally been behind closed doors. Nginx is written for the most part by one brilliant man, Igor Sysoev, who accepts patches on the Nginx mailing list. But for a long time there was no source repository with which contributors and interested people can track the development process, and no official bug tracker. All of that have changed in 2011. Igor has established Nginx as a company. The Nginx SVN repository is now open to the public and a few days ago they even opened a Trac. In short: a lot of great news lately.

Announcing the Github Nginx mirror

These days a lot of people have switched from Subversion to Git. When you’ve worked with Git for a while, Subversion probably feels archaic and unproductive. The “killer app” for Git is Github, which provides an unbeatable collaboration experience. Indeed, many projects that have switched to Github reported a dramatic increase in contributions!

In order to stimulate Nginx development, we’ve launched a Github mirror of the Nginx SVN repository:

• Github page: https://github.com/phusion/nginx
• Git URL: git://github.com/phusion/nginx.git

A few notes about this mirror:

• It’s automatically updated twice a day.
• It’s read-only. We don’t accept pull requests. Changes should be sent to the Nginx mailing list in the form of patches.
• We intentionally don’t mirror all the branches and tags, only the most recent ones, because we don’t believe the old branches and tags are useful to anybody.
• Please feel free to contact us if you have an issue with our mirror.

Happy developing!