Introduction 
Tengine is a web server originated by Taobao, the largest e-commerce website in Asia. It is based on the Nginx HTTP server and has many advanced features. Tengine has proven to be very stable and efficient on some of the top 100 websites in the world, including taobao.com and tmall.com.
Tengine has been an open source project since December 2011. It is being actively developed by the Tengine team, whose core members are from Taobao, Sogou and other Internet companies. Tengine is a community effort and everyone is encouraged to get involved.
Features
- All features of nginx-1.6.2 are inherited, i.e., it is 100% compatible with nginx.
- Dynamic module loading support. You don't need to recompile Tengine when adding new modules to it.
- SPDY v3 support, and SPDY/HTTP servers can listen on the same port.
- Sends unbuffered upload directly to HTTP and FastCGI backend servers, which saves disk I/Os.
- More load balancing methods, e.g., consistent hashing, and session persistence.
- Input body filter support. It's quite handy to write Web Application Firewalls using this mechanism.
- Dynamic scripting language (Lua) support, which is very efficient and makes it easy to extend core functionalities.
- Logging enhancements. Syslog (local and remote), pipe logging, and log sampling are supported.
- Limits retries for upstream servers (proxy, memcached, fastcgi, scgi, uwsgi).
- Includes a mechanism to support standalone processes.
- Protects the server in case system load or memory use goes too high.
- Multiple CSS or JavaScript requests can be combined into one request to reduce download time.
- Removes unnecessary white spaces and comments to reduce the size of a page.
- Proactive health checks of upstream servers can be performed.
- The number of worker processes and CPU affinities can be set automatically.
- The limit_req module is enhanced with whitelist support and more conditions are allowed in a single location.
- Enhanced diagnostic information makes it easier to troubleshoot errors.
- More user-friendly command lines, e.g., showing all compiled-in modules and supported directives.
- Expiration times can be specified for certain MIME types.
- Error pages can be reset to 'default'.
- ...
Installation
Tengine can be downloaded at http://tengine.taobao.org/download/tengine.tar.gz. You can also checkout the latest source code from GitHub at https://github.com/alibaba/tengine
To install Tengine, just follow these three steps:
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install
By default, it will be installed to /usr/local/nginx. You can use the '--prefix' option to specify the root directory. If you want to know all the 'configure' options, you should run './configure --help' for help.
Documentation
The homepage of Tengine is at http://tengine.taobao.org/ You can access http://tengine.taobao.org/documentation.html for more information.
Mailing lists
Mailing lists are usually good places to ask questions. We highly recommend you subscribe to Tengine's mailing lists below: