Whats the point of nginx now?

[Josema]

Hi, I use to build my projects on top of express.js and nginx. But after discovering this project and seeing that supports compression and SSL not sure if make sense to use nginx anymore. Is ok if I go only with uWebSockets.js or I can lose some features nginx have that uWs.js doesn't?

[ghost]

I can't answer what you should or shouldn't do. It's up to you.

[JhonnyJason]

I am not sure about the performance difference - might be interesting to investigate.

However, one important thing is the use of nginx as a reverse proxy for urls with different domains/servernames but resolving to the same IP address.

Basically you want nodejs to serve 1 application - uWS makes it faster - but you want nginx to serve multiple applications from a single point of access.

[the-lstv]

It's correct that you don't need Nginx at all.

You don't lose any functionality (there isn't anything special that Nginx does that uWS doesn't).

I also migrated from using Nginx+Express to just uWS about a year ago, managing many servers at once.

It works flawlessly, only challenge I had in my case was to make uWS handle SSL for multiple domains + wildcards through a single router, but it worked well at the end and was worth it.

I use a single uWS server to manage all my web applications, which makes this easier, and for cases where I needed a separate server I made a simple proxy function built into my uWS router.

Removing Nginx can make your setup simpler, less bloated and also faster by a small bit.

Performance-wise you will most likely see a small improvement since a proxy is just an extra step. The difference won't be significant but it'l be there, so unless you need Nginx for other things, I'd say go for it.

I also just realized that this question is over 5 years old.

[JhonnyJason]

"It works flawlessly, only challenge I had in my case was to make uWS handle SSL for multiple domains + wildcards through a single router, but it worked well at the end and was worth it."

This is the usecase I am interested in and why I am using nginx - how "well" did it work out in the end? How laborious is this journey (days or > week)?

[the-lstv]

Sorry for the late reply, I didnt notice that your post was a reply to my comment.

It's actually not difficult (the API already has support for this), just not very well documented and the API isn't very clear/helpful, so I figured it out on my own via trial-and-error.

I am not sure if I'm doing it 100% correctly, either way, it works.
It logs some stuff to the console on every domain, so I am guessing it's an experimental feature.

You use SSLApp.addServerName(domain, options) to add a certificate, and then SSLApp.domain(domain) to setup routers for it.
Once you figure out how to work with that its pretty simple to use.

This is roughly how I do it:

// Your SSL App
const SSLApp = uws.SSLApp();


function addDomain(domain) {
    // Your certificates
    SSLApp.addServerName(domain, {
        key_file_name:  `/etc/letsencrypt/live/${domain.replace("*.", "")}/fullchain.pem`,
        cert_file_name: `/etc/letsencrypt/live/${domain.replace("*.", "")}/privkey.pem`
    })

    // Here, you setup routers for the domain
    // In my case I route everything through a single function, which might not be what you are looking for
    SSLApp.domain(domain).any("/*", resolve) // .ws("/*", {}) ...
}


function resolve(res, req){
    // Handles HTTPS requests for all domains + subdomains
    res.end()
}


// Domains to handle, if you want it to be done automatically

for(let domain of ["example.com", "another-domain.net"]) {
    addDomain(domain)

    // In the case of wildcard certificates - to handle all subdomains too
    addDomain("*." + domain)
}


SSLApp.listen(443);

It should also be possible to handle missing domains on the fly:

SSLApp.missingServerName((hostname) => {
    addDomain(hostname)
})

However, this didnt work well for me as far as I remember. It is also an issue that setting up the router when a request is already being processed isn't a very good idea.

[JhonnyJason]

Thank you very much for the starter - seems more like day then weeks ;-)

[uasan]

Over these 5 years, there is only one reason why Nginx is needed, it is HTTP 2 and HTTP 3, uWS works only on HTTP 1.1, this means that all your requests in 1 connection are executed sequentially, without multiplexing, this is important for performance.

[the-lstv]

HTTP3 support in uWS should be available soon hopefully :)