Tengine

Tengine
Developers	Taobao (Alibaba Group) and community Core contributors from Taobao, Ant Group, Alibaba Cloud, Sogou and others
Initial release	December 2011;14 years ago (2011-12)
Stable release	3.1.0 / October 27, 2023;2 years ago (2023-10-27)
Repository	github.com/alibaba/tengine
Written in	C, Perl, others
Operating system	Linux, Unix-like systems (primarily)
Type	Web server, reverse proxy
License	BSD-2-Clause
Website	tengine.taobao.org

Tengine is an open-source web server and reverse proxy software, developed as a feature-enhanced distribution (fork) of Nginx. ^[1] It was originated by Taobao, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, to address the high-concurrency and high-traffic requirements of large-scale e-commerce platforms.

History

Tengine was first developed internally at Taobao to handle the massive traffic demands of taobao.com, one of the world's largest e-commerce websites. The project was open-sourced on December 2, 2011, initially based on Nginx 1.0.x. Its name derives from "Taobao Engine," later shortened to Tengine (paralleling Nginx's "Engine X").

The core development team includes contributors from Taobao, Alibaba Cloud, Ant Group, and other companies such as Sogou. The project has been maintained as a community-driven effort, with the source code hosted on GitHub under the Alibaba organization.

Name origin and confusion

The name "Tengine" was chosen as a shortened form of "Taobao Engine," inspired by Nginx ("Engine X").

Features

Tengine maintains 100% configuration compatibility with its base Nginx version (currently aligned with features from Nginx 1.24.0) while adding enterprise-oriented enhancements: ^{[2] [3]}

• Dynamic configuration — Zero-downtime updates for servers, domains, TLS certificates, routing rules, timeouts, HTTPS redirects, CORS, and robots.txt via tools like tengine-ingress.
• Advanced networking — Full HTTP/3 support (QUIC v1 and draft-29), kernel-bypass high-speed UDP forwarding (xudp), and CONNECT method for forward proxy scenarios.
• Load balancing and routing — Dynamic routing based on HTTP headers, cookies, query parameters (including modulo/weight operations), consistent hashing, session persistence, proactive upstream health checks, and dynamic domain resolution.
• Performance and security — Asynchronous SSL/TLS with hardware acceleration (e.g., QAT), unbuffered uploads, local DNS caching, enhanced rate limiting with whitelists, system protection under overload, and asynchronous logging.
• Scripting — Dynamic Lua scripting support for custom extensions.
• Content optimization — CSS/JS concatenation, whitespace/comment removal, and MIME-type expiration control.
• Monitoring — Collection of runtime statistics by key (domain, URL, etc.).

A Kubernetes-focused variant, Tengine-Ingress, enables dynamic reconfiguration in containerized environments.

See also

• Nginx
• LiteSpeed
• Apache HTTP Server
• OpenResty

References

1. Tsung (2011-12-28). "淘寶將 Web Server Open Source - Tengine". Tsung's Blog (in Chinese (Taiwan)). Retrieved 2026-01-03.
2. Simard, David Moreau (2014-06-21). "A use case of Tengine, a drop-in replacement and fork of nginx". dmsimard.com. Retrieved 2026-01-03.
3. "Nginx vs. Tengine usage statistics, January 2026". w3techs.com. Retrieved 2026-01-03.

External links

• Official website