OpenResty^® is a full-fledged web platform that integrates our enhanced version of the Nginx core, our enhanced version of LuaJIT, many carefully written Lua libraries, lots of high quality 3rd-party Nginx modules, and most of their external dependencies. It is designed to help developers easily build scalable web applications, web services, and dynamic web gateways.

By taking advantage of various well-designed Nginx modules (most of which are developed by the OpenResty team themselves), OpenResty^® effectively turns the nginx server into a powerful web app server, in which the web developers can use the Lua programming language to script various existing nginx C modules and Lua modules and construct extremely high-performance web applications that are capable to handle 10K ~ 1000K+ connections in a single box.

OpenResty^® aims to run your server-side web app completely in the Nginx server, leveraging Nginx's event model to do non-blocking I/O not only with the HTTP clients, but also with remote backends like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Memcached, and Redis.

Real-world applications of OpenResty^® range from dynamic web portals and web gateways, web application firewalls, web service platforms for mobile apps/advertising/distributed storage/data analytics, to full-fledged dynamic web applications and web sites. The hardware used to run OpenResty^® also ranges from very big metals to embedded devices with very limited resources. It is not uncommon for our production users to serve billions of requests daily for millions of active users with just a handful of machines.

OpenResty^® is not an Nginx fork. It is a higher level application and gateway platform using Nginx as a component. Most of the patches applied to the Nginx core in OpenResty^® have already been submitted to the official Nginx team and most of the patches submitted have also been accepted. We constantly import the latest features and bug fixes from the official Nginx team, the official LuaJIT repository, and other sources.

See Components for the complete list of software bundled in OpenResty^®.

See GettingStarted on how to quickly setup an OpenResty^® server that can say hello world over HTTP. Or you can go to the Download section to grab OpenResty^®'s source code tarball directly.

We provide free technical support through the community on the openresty and openresty-en mailing lists. See Community.

Our OpenResty Inc. company offers enterprise solutions based on OpenResty to its global customers, with commercial support.