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Comment by imhoguy | Hacker News Reader

To courious web nerds: currently both Nginx and HAproxy have got Lua scripting modules to extend themselves by implementing e.g. customized filtering, routing, caching, proxing, storage etc. One can even build a full featured web app backend in embedded Lua tied to Nginx.

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Disclaimer: I am CTO of Kong.

If you want to look at a large OpenResty/Lua application from a code perspective you could take a look at Kong[1] - which is the most popular public codebase built on top of NGINX/Lua at the moment.

CloudFlare also uses the same stack but most of their codebase is proprietary.

What really makes Nginx/Lua a good combination is primarily LuaJIT[2] support, a much faster implementation of the Lua VM.

[1] - https://github.com/Kong/kong

[2] - http://luajit.org

What made you choose Lua instead of say, embedding Python into nginx? I can think of a few good reasons like embeddability, code size, simplicity but it would be interesting to hear your take on this.

Luajit is pretty fast

Can't speak for Kong, but I'm currently working on creating a microservice in lapis (using moonscript). The speed of the underlying OpenResty server, as well as lapis ergonomics make this really fun. I guess the only practical reason I can see is the async everything without clutches approach, as well as the truly impressive TTFB.

For me, day 1 productivity is really high, comparable to Nancy, the framework I was using before.

Redis and Envoy also have the same. It seems to be the scripting lingua franca for interacting with native code.

Shameless plug: I maintain an open source Mac app called Hammerspoon that opens up a ton of OS frameworks/events to a Lua environment for your scripting/automation pleasure :)

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