Nginx NGINX 1.6 and 1.7 released

Today (24 April), we announced the release of NGINX 1.6 and 1.7. This article explains how we schedule product releases at NGINX and explains the significance of this version number change.


NGINX 1.6 was forked from the current 1.5 ‘mainline’ branch, and the 1.5 branch renumbered to 1.7. This is an annual checkpoint where we take the current mainline (feature) branch and fork it to a stable (no new features) branch. We continue active development on the renumbered mainline branch.

Versions 1.4 is no longer supported. 1.5 is forked to create 1.6 (“stable”) and renumbered to 1.7 (“mainline”)​

In NGINX nomenclature, “stable” means that no new features are added (the feature set is stable). Only major bugfixes are committed to that version.

We develop new features and all bugfixes against the “mainline” branch, merging major bugfixes to stable. We operate a time-based release process, so you can expect to see new mainline releases approximately once per month, with exceptional releases when necessary. Over the last year, mainline has seen the introduction of SPDY 3.1 support, authentication via subrequests, SSL session ticket support, IPv6 support for DNS, PROXY protocol support and we integrated contributions for SSL support for uwsgi. We’ve extended error logging, added cache revalidation directives, added SMTP pipelining, buffering options for FastCGI, improved support for mp4 streaming and extended handling of byte-range requests for streaming and caching.

Note that stable does not mean ‘more reliable or more bug-free’. In fact, mainline is generally regarded as more reliable because only critical fixes are merged to stable. Changes in the stable branch are very unlikely to affect 3rd party modules; we don’t make the same commitment concerning the mainline branch where new features may affect the operation of 3rd party modules.

Which version should I use?


In general, you should deploy the NGINX mainline branch at all times. You may wish to use stable if you are concerned about possible impacts of new features, such as incompatibility with third-party modules or the introduction of bugs in new features.

If you have pinned your installation with the official NGINX repository (either the stable or mainline branches), next time you update you will get the latest 1.6 or 1.7 builds as appropriate.

If you install nginx from a third-party repository, you may not have control over which version is deployed, and the repository may not keep pace with builds from the mainline or stable branches. Where possible, you should install NGINX from our repository, where the binaries are tested against our internal regression framework and keep pace with releases from the official NGINX source.

You can run nginx -V to determine the version number of your NGINX binary:

user@host:~$ nginx -v
nginx version: nginx/1.5.12
What about NGINX Plus?


NGINX Plus is the commercially-supported version of NGINX, with a number of additional features (many of which utilise a new shared-memory architecture specific to Plus). NGINX Plus tracks the mainline version of NGINX, and is typically released on a three-monthly cycle. New features in the mainline branch are merged into Plus and released once they have passed full integration testing and have been proven in-the-field in the NGINX F/OSS branch:

NGINX Plus tracks mainline, and adds some commercial-only features​

The internal version numbers in NGINX Plus match the mainline release that NGINX Plus is most closely synchronized with.

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