Day 13 - modules and versions

nginx is modular to hell. I think I already mentioned that and modules are the basic on which you can build pretty much any kind of server using nginx. You heard about nginx being both a mail and an http server. But you could probably make an ftp or dns server with it. And all this thanks to modules.

Basically, nginx defines the notion of module to be a group of handlers (remember my previous post) that it will trigger at different points in its life-cycle (basically starting the master process, starting the children/worker processes and death of those). That's it... Now, the smart thing (but also the confusing one) is that a given module can refine what a module is. And that's exactly what you get with HTTP modules: they are specialized modules. There is one "core" module called "http" (http/ngx_http.c) and this module basically defines what "http" modules are and how they are managed. Other types of modules include "core" modules, "event" modules (that's how nginx copes with various event-based interfaces like epoll, kqueue, select, etc.), "http" modules (the most common ones) and "mail" modules. But you could have your own type of modules. This is a good design and I take for a proof of this that Igor was able to build both a mail and an http server from this.

Now, after saying something nice about this design, there is something in the code that does not make sense to me: the implementation of versions of the module architecture. It's everywhere in the code with reference to the macros NGX_MODULE_V1/NGX_MODULE_V1_PADDING. There does not seem to be any example of modules with anything but version 1. I understand the need to have a version (NGX_MODULE_V1): it gives you a criterion to figure out what is the right version of the struct that is used and allows you to cast safely. But the padding is just killing me: the structure already has spare "slots" and the existing mechanism with module types gives already plenty of room for changing what a module is. And if the structure (without padding) would prove to be not enough, you could always extend it with a "larger" structure and cast it. I guess that's another question I will have to ask the development mailing list. At least, it will get discussions going there.