Back in April, we released an experimental version of NGINX into the wild for cPanel users at large to test and play around with. The feedback we’ve received from you, the cPanel Community, has been great! For those of you that have been using the experimental version of NGINX, there have been several add-on features that have been requested we add to NGINX including:
- Basic Auth Support
- Server Side Includes
- CGI Support
While we’re still a long way from a production-level version of NGINX, we’re inching ever closer. So what have we added?
Basic Auth Support
The number one most asked for request after introducing NGINX was support for Basic Auth. If you’re not familiar with Basic Auth, the idea is to provide a method to password protect directories. This will enable basic auth in NGINX via the Directory Privacy section of cPanel, and will now prompt anyone attempting to view the folder via an internet browser with a login dialogue box asking for a username and password.
We believe this is the first step toward NGINX becoming a production-ready feature. This feature will work similarly to how we implemented the way WordPress works with WordPress Manager. Directory Privacy will make it possible to configure your server without having to rely on a systems administrator to make those changes
Server Side Includes
Server Side Includes is a text-based programming language that follows the syntax of <!--#directive parameter=value parameter=value --> SSIs are used for inserting the contents of one file into multiple pages. These directives are placed in HTML comments (on the webpage itself) if SSI is not enabled, people browsing the site will not see the SSI directives unless they view the page’s source. SSIs are useful for when a small snippet of code needs to be updated on multiple pages.
We heard you loud and clear: you wanted SSIs for NGINX? You’ve got em! For more information about SSIs, please take a look at our Apache handlers documentation.
CGI support
We’ve added handlers (.cgi, .pl, .plx, .ppl and .perl) for CGI scripts! Assuming you have not disabled Apache, as NGINX has no drive to handle these processes natively, these scripts should all work. We have to continue to rely on Apache to do some of the heavy lifting, so please ensure you have not disabled Apache.
We’re still in the very early stages of NGINX implementation, so it’s not as completely wired into cPanel & WHM as Apache is. In order for any new WordPress sites and password protected directories to work, or implement any changes made while using NGINX, you’ll need to run /scripts/ea-nginx config --all to ensure all changes are applied.
Without the valuable feedback from the cPanel Community, we would not able to implement these upgrades and continue to work on adding more features to NGINX. If you have more ideas for NGINX, want to provide feedback for your experience with it or anything else in cPanel & WHM, please join our Slack or Discord channels and our official cPanel subreddit!
