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Comment by evgpbfhnr | Hacker News Reader

FWIW gixy (nginx configuration checker) catches this: https://github.com/yandex/gixy/blob/master/docs/en/plugins/a...

(and nixos automatically runs gixy on a configuration generated through it, so the system refuses to build <3)

If a webserver requires additional tools for the user to avoid all these pitfalls, maybe just maybe it should re-evaluate its defaults.

Yeah, the config checker should be built-in, and if it does not pass, then one must use --force or similar to start the server.

But then how will nginx continue to pretend that it is still 1995?

nginx was once amazing, but it’s decidedly bad now when compared to modern webservers.

What is a modern webserver? I only use Apache or nginx... anything cobbled together with nodejs or go doesn't count.

Caddy has been my default choice recently: https://caddyserver.com

Among other things, it features automatic TLS via ACME and dead-simple configuration for my most common use cases: namely, serving a directory of static files and reverse-proxying to an app server.

It is written in Go, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as "cobbled together."

I'm also a fan of Traefik but it's strictly a reverse proxy, there's not even built-in support for serving static files. But it's great if you have e.g. a bunch of containers on a single host and you want to front them all with a single load balancer.

Thank you. I didn't know about gixy and ran it on my home server which found a vulnerability ($uri in a 301 redirect)

I just gave nix a go and so far it seems great.

But do you know, if they’re a nicer options finder? The one I found where you just search all several thousand options kinda sucks. I want to just see my package (say, ssh) and just the ssh options, but the results get littered with irrelevancy.

When I roughly know what I'm doing I use search.nixos.org; if you give it the full services.foo prefix it's usually relevant enough, e.g. for ssh you'd want "services.openssh", which you can find skimming through the results of just searching 'ssh' first:

https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&from=0&siz...

For anything I'm not 100% sure will be obvious I search through a local clone of the nixpkgs repo directly, but I'll be honest and say I just never took time to search for a better tool

My main usage of Nix is on non-NixOS machines, and I use Home Manager, and while it has a similar problem, just searching the options in the packages it provides configuration for is a smaller issue.

Not sure if this helps you at all or not, it really depends on your usage of Nix, but for managing user configuration I do recommend Home Manager.

> if they’re a nicer options finder?

https://mynixos.com/

> I want to just see my package (say, ssh) and just the ssh options

https://mynixos.com/nixpkgs/options/programs.ssh

I would suggest using man and searching like any piece of documentation. Specifically you are looking for `man configuration.nix`

That's actually worse search experience and slower because less is struggling with the amount of lines.

https://mynixos.com/

I found this a few weeks ago: https://github.com/mlvzk/manix

NixOS doesn't run Gixy anymore, see https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/209075.

NixOS core maintainer here. That's about nginx' own test. Gixy is still run when writing any nginx config file with the writer helper function https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/b6cc06826812247fe54655...

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