Tengine

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

Alibaba's fork of nginx with extra modules for health checks, dynamic upstreams, HTTP/3 and Chinese SM2 cryptography, kept compatible with nginx configuration.

Adopt it when

You need nginx with built-in active health checks or Chinese national cryptography and are comfortable tracking a fork.

Watch out

It trails upstream nginx releases, and most documentation and discussion are in Chinese.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server

Built with

C and Lua

How established

Established: started 14 years ago, latest release 3.1.0.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Tengine → GCC → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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