What An Absolute Unit
Peeking Under the Hood of nginx Unit’s Node.js Integration
nginx is a fast, nimble, and deeply powerful HTTP server. It’s extraordinarily good at getting data from a remote hard disk to a client machine over an internet connection. It’s also frequently used as a lightweight reverse proxy. Plunk it down between some other server and the rest of the internet, and it can provide load balancing, caching, SSL termination, and a host (as it were) of other handy features. If you’ve ever run a web application through an nginx frontend, you’ve used its proxying capabilities: nginx doesn’t run the app, but sits in front of it, handling incoming connections and passing them back to the application server proper through PHP-FPM, WSGI, or something like Phusion Passenger.
Unit is different. The brainchild of nginx’s original author, Igor Sysoev, Unit is a full-fledged application server in its own right. It integrates directly with your application, running your code and spitting out the responses you generate—no static assets, no load balancing, all app.
With Unit, configuration is entirely dynamic, managed through calls to its RESTful API—applications can be loaded, unloaded, and configured on the fly, without messy restarts and downtime, by sending it JSON payloads. Unit also handles process management for your apps, allowing…
