We are thrilled to announce that GitHub is now the NGINX Open Source project’s official repository!
When NGINX Open Source was first released in 2004, Git wasn’t available. And while NGINX Open Source has been mirrored on GitHub from its Mercurial home for some time now, we decided to fully move the project after requests from the community.
Why Move NGINX to GitHub?
The move of NGINX Open Source to GitHub is driven by the adoption of Git for code repository work. Many of you are familiar with Git, with ~93.9% of developers reporting that they use it. Working with Git increases our project access and makes getting involved with the project easier.
Transitioning NGINX Open Source to a native GitHub project was more challenging. It required that we implement several tooling changes, set up GitHub Actions to handle our CI/CD processes and extensive testing, and enhance our approach to handling issues, feature requests, and discussions. By concentrating our effort on this GitHub repository, our team believes we can improve project responsiveness and keep the community better informed on the state and direction of NGINX Open Source.
While the move posed technical challenges, some of our other popular open source projects, like NGINX JavaScript (njs) and NGINX Unit, have already made the move. If you’ve used either of those, you already know that your access to discussions and issues is improved. (If you’re not familiar with them, you should check them out now!)
Benefits and Impact of Moving NGINX to GitHub
What’s the immediate impact? Starting now, you can send us bug reports, feature requests and enhancements directly under the Issues tab. You can also submit your Pull Requests (PRs) directly through GitHub. Additionally, the NGINX Open Source project forum is now in GitHub Discussions. In the forum, you can ask questions (and answer others), discuss ideas and challenges with the NGINX team and your peers, and keep track of where NGINX Open Source is heading.
We recognize that NGINX Open Source has a long history on Mercurial and that the NGINX email distribution list reaches a large part of our community. So, we will continue to support the Mercurial repositories for the foreseeable future while moving development to GitHub. We invite you to bring your ideas and concerns about Mercurial to GitHub Discussions so we can better understand any challenges there.
Similarly, we will continue to support the dissemination of information. We will assist you in transitioning your bug reports and issues to GitHub for a while, with the understanding that all future issue submissions will eventually be moved to and managed on GitHub. If you have immediate concerns, GitHub Discussions is the best way to get answers.
Trust that we understand the importance of NGINX Open Source to your work and the larger web, with NGINX serving a significant chunk of internet traffic every day. Performance and security will remain our focus, with code quality always top of our minds.
Share Your Feedback
This is still a work in progress. We want to know what you think. If you find something broken, let us know. If you have ideas, reach out. If you see a typo, submit a PR. We’re here to work with you and to be transparent in our actions and our direction. We plan to find even more ways to share information and project direction.
In the meantime, go check out the official NGINX Open Source repository on GitHub. We’d appreciate it if you gave the project a star, watched it, or even forked it off for your idea development and use.
See you in GitHub Discussions and in the community!