Tengine
| Tengine | |
|---|---|
| Developers | Taobao (Alibaba Group) and community Core contributors from Taobao, Ant Group, Alibaba Cloud, Sogou and others |
| Initial release | December 2011; 14 years ago (2011-12) |
| Stable release | 3.1.0
/ October 27, 2023; 2 years ago (2023年10月27日) |
| Repository | github |
| Written in | C, Perl, others |
| Operating system | Linux, Unix-like systems (primarily) |
| Type | Web server, reverse proxy |
| License | BSD-2-Clause |
| Website | tengine |
Tengine is an open-source web server and reverse proxy software, developed as a feature-enhanced distribution (fork) of Nginx.[1] It was originated by Taobao, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, to address the high-concurrency and high-traffic requirements of large-scale e-commerce platforms.
History
[edit ]Tengine was first developed internally at Taobao to handle the massive traffic demands of taobao.com, one of the world's largest e-commerce websites. The project was open-sourced on December 2, 2011, initially based on Nginx 1.0.x. Its name derives from "Taobao Engine," later shortened to Tengine (paralleling Nginx's "Engine X").
The core development team includes contributors from Taobao, Alibaba Cloud, Ant Group, and other companies such as Sogou. The project has been maintained as a community-driven effort, with the source code hosted on GitHub under the Alibaba organization.
Name origin and confusion
[edit ]The name "Tengine" was chosen as a shortened form of "Taobao Engine," inspired by Nginx ("Engine X").
Features
[edit ]Tengine maintains 100% configuration compatibility with its base Nginx version (currently aligned with features from Nginx 1.24.0) while adding enterprise-oriented enhancements:[2] [3]
- Dynamic configuration — Zero-downtime updates for servers, domains, TLS certificates, routing rules, timeouts, HTTPS redirects, CORS, and robots.txt via tools like tengine-ingress.
- Advanced networking — Full HTTP/3 support (QUIC v1 and draft-29), kernel-bypass high-speed UDP forwarding (xudp), and CONNECT method for forward proxy scenarios.
- Load balancing and routing — Dynamic routing based on HTTP headers, cookies, query parameters (including modulo/weight operations), consistent hashing, session persistence, proactive upstream health checks, and dynamic domain resolution.
- Performance and security — Asynchronous SSL/TLS with hardware acceleration (e.g., QAT), unbuffered uploads, local DNS caching, enhanced rate limiting with whitelists, system protection under overload, and asynchronous logging.
- Scripting — Dynamic Lua scripting support for custom extensions.
- Content optimization — CSS/JS concatenation, whitespace/comment removal, and MIME-type expiration control.
- Monitoring — Collection of runtime statistics by key (domain, URL, etc.).
A Kubernetes-focused variant, Tengine-Ingress, enables dynamic reconfiguration in containerized environments.
See also
[edit ]References
[edit ]- ^ Tsung (2011年12月28日). "淘寶將 Web Server Open Source - Tengine". Tsung's Blog (in Chinese (Taiwan)). Retrieved 2026年01月03日.
- ^ Simard, David Moreau (2014年06月21日). "A use case of Tengine, a drop-in replacement and fork of nginx". dmsimard.com. Retrieved 2026年01月03日.
- ^ "Nginx vs. Tengine usage statistics, January 2026". w3techs.com. Retrieved 2026年01月03日.