NGINX serves up SPDY and more in 1.4.0

The latest stable version, 1.4.0, of NGINX, the popular high performance web server and reverse proxy, has been released, bringing the features offered in the 1.3 development tree together into a supported release. As well as headline features such as support for the SPDY protocol and WebSocket proxying, the release contains many smaller enhancements and other bugfixes.

All of the headline features have been visible in NGINX 1.3.x versions. For example, since NGINX 1.3.13, WebSocket connections have been able to be properly proxied by the server and, since version 1.3.7, NGINX has supported OCSP Stapling, designed to reduce the cost of checking SSL certificates.

The experimental SPDY protocol module introduced in version 1 also been included as part of NGINX 1.4.0 but, according to the documentation, is not built into the server by default; administrators will need to build the server with a --with-http_spdy_module flag set. The change log notes that the SPDY work was sponsored by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.

Also added to the system is the gunzip module, which can decompress gzipped content for clients that are unable to do so. Other smaller enhancements include added rejection codes in the case of flood prevention, interlacing support in the image filter, and IPV6 support in the geoip module.

NGINX 1.4.0 is published under the 2 clause BSD licence and is available to download for Windows or as source, and is packaged in repositories for Linux systems.

(djwm)