Ask HN: Where can I find an active help community for Nginx as a solo dev? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where can I find an active help community for Nginx as a solo dev?

19 pointsgeuis19 comments

I'm asking this out of a lot of frustration.

At a high level, I have a few expert-level questions and need some help troubleshooting some problems that while not unique, are absolutely nothing I can find any related results just by searching.

Adding to the frustration are the following:

* Google's search results are so completely useless these days it makes me angry. It seems that no matter what magic spell of keyword combinations I try, all of the top level results are either completely unrelated to what I search for or are otherwise just populated by SEO related spam that is mostly just nginx's commercial vomit.

* Serverfault.com looks dead. I asked something there in late April and to date its had 28 views and no comments or answers.

* Asking on general Stackoverflow gets your question closed because its not programming related. (I agree with that policy. Just saying its not and shouldn't be a valid avenue for help with this topic.)

* https://www.reddit.com/r/nginx/ is mostly a dead community.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/ is really active, but generally not a good place to ask for nginx.

* I don't think there is a Discord community channel for nginx. I searched a bit the other day for this and couldn't find one.

* I've resorted to ChatGPT and it at least acts like it understands my questions, and it is somewhat helpful sometimes, but most of the time the answers it gives are not actually accurate enough to help. But a couple of times it has pointed me towards the right direction.

Although I've worked as a software engineer for years here in SF, only a couple of my friends are even in the field and none of them have experience that would help.

I've recognized that I'm probably at least shoulder deep into this particular rabbit hole and its time to ask for some help to pull my head out and show me other resources I'm not aware of.

Appreciate everyone's help.

I’ve been using Nginx for a few years now and I’ve found the official documentation and forums to be very helpful. They have a lot of examples, tutorials, and FAQs that cover most of the common use cases and issues. You can also ask questions on their mailing list or IRC channel and get answers from the developers and other users.

Another resource that I like is the Nginx subreddit (r/nginx). It’s a friendly and active community where you can post your questions, problems, tips, and feedback. You can also learn from other people’s experiences and solutions.

If you’re looking for more specific or advanced help, you might want to check out some of the online courses or books on Nginx. I’ve heard good things about Nginx Fundamentals by Ray Viljoen and Mastering Nginx by Dimitri Aivaliotis. They cover a lot of topics from installation and configuration to optimization and security.

Hope this helps!

maybe you can go to slack? https://community.nginx.org/joinslack

oh hey.... thank you! That had totally slipped my mind as another venue to check out. Thanks!

FWIW, Nginx also has a mailing list. AFAICT it’s quite active.

https://nginx.org/en/support.html

Google did a change that went unnoticed by the majority of us.

Fortunately there is a way to get more accurate results than what you currently get with this option being turned off by default: Click on the Tools button and change from All Results to Verbatim; now you should get better results than before; it's not a panacea, but still it's better than what you get by default I'm afraid.

Two more options: - Read the source code. NGinx is some of the cleanest C code I've seen and is fairly to read / grep for added insights. - Buy a license to get paid support. Be aware though that they won't support you if you've modified the source code.

Write a blog about the problems, what you've done to try to fix it, and how nginx is completely unusable and you're going to switch to apache/netscape/caddy.

Post it to HN, get traction.

Get way more help and responses than you can shake a stick at, and track where they come from.

It's a proven research method. I forget the name, but post the wrong answer to annoy someone else to provide the right one.

It's called Cunningham's law

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

You missed your chance to say it was Culligan's Law until someone angrily corrected you. ;)

I can't wait to try this next time the chance occurs

The nginx mailing list is very active and very helpful… some advice don’t ask to ask just ask… you probably could ask your question here and get an answer…

You can just ask the question here. We have learnt a lot by experimenting and Googling.

Can you share the specific problem?

Also learning the internals or playing with OpenResty will help.

The OpenResty mailing list is quiet, but very knowledgeable. Might be worth a try.

ChatGPT is a waste of time for NGINX. I spent days fiddling with it, consulting with prompt gurus, even offered cash in a few places to anybody who could figure it out, and still couldn't get any sense out of it.

With all the hype of people saying they were using it for dev, I wanted it to give me a valid NGINX config that included specific URL rewrites. I gave it the original Apache .htaccess file, the documentation, and the URL rewrites it would require.

Despite endlessly correcting it, trying many, many, many different prompts, I still couldn't get it to stop hallucinating. That's what LLMs do.

Eventually I just did it myself, took 2 minutes. I can only conclude that most people's Dunning-Kruger complex prevents them from knowing when the LLM is wrong. I will say that every config file it output looked convincing with a cursory glance, but they were generally non-functional and full of hallucinations.

In terms of communities, can't help you there, sorry. It's oddly niche.

Contrary to what openai shills and paid advertisers claim chatgpt fails often. “Hallucinations” are an euphemism for low quality content.

In this specific scenario, it isn't so much the quality (a valid config), it's literally adding URL rewrites that do nothing because they are unnecessary and don't exist in the documentation, it also not infrequently modified them, meaning that it wasn't what I'd given it.

Not being able to do simplistic tasks like this really makes me doubt the claims of others, either that or what they're doing is complete shite and they don't even know it's shite. IMO, it seems likely that there's a lot of highly inappropriate hires who are actually outdone by an LLM, which says more about them than the LLM. It's a very low bar.

replace nginx with 50 lines of go. only kind of joking.

Nginx Mailing List: https://nginx.org/en/support.html, Nginx Forum: https://forum.nginx.org/

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