If you've ever wondered whether you can make a few changes to NGINX dynamically or wanted a bit more flexibility, then you're going to love OpenResty.
Think of OpenResty as NGINX with the kitchen sink thrown in; it's a combination of NGINX, along with Lua scripting, and several additional third-party modules all packaged up and ready to use. The inclusion of Lua scripting and additional modules allows NGINX to be extended to be a full web application rather than simply a web server.
Some may fear that this additional functionality comes with a performance hit, but this simply isn't the case. Large platforms, such as Cloudflare, use a combination of NGINX and Lua to achieve what they do at scale, and it's due to the power of OpenResty. In fact, the original creator, Yichun Zhang worked for Cloudflare on OpenResty and has now formed a separate...