[stanleydrew]

Yeah I've been skeptical of nginx's Lua support in the past. I guess I discounted it because it was a relatively unknown feature and Lua is obviously not nearly as popular as JavaScript. I don't know of any production service written exclusively in Lua, though I'm sure there are some.

So yes while this is just a continuation of a bad idea, it's a rather substantial continuation. I fear that a lot more people will make use of this than make use of nginx's Lua support.

[Touche]

OpenResty is built on Nginx's Lua support and is fairly popular. You're probably using websites that use it without knowing it.

[thegeomaster]

There's also Lapis, a really great and reasonably feature-full web app framework for OpenResty: http://leafo.net/lapis/. I wrote a website in it recently and was pleasantly surprised at how cool it is. It reminds me a lot of Rails, but everything works faster, especially on LuaJIT, and I actually like MoonScript (the compile-to-Lua language I'm using) for its expresiveness and aesthetics. Definitely recommend checking it out.

[josegonzalez]

We use the lua support in openresty to build our authentication layer for admin tools outside of those admin tools. Very easy to integrate it with a third party authentication platform and just provide auth for free to our app developers.

[stock_toaster]

I have read that cloudflare uses nginx lua a ton. Apparently so does taobao (via tengine?).

[derefr]

AFIAK, CloudFlare is entirely just Nginx+Lua scripts.

[mtourne]

That is not fully true.

It became a lot more true during 2013, but CloudFlare had already been operating for a few years then. A lot of fairly simple code was retired to the profit of Lua code, which is way easier to maintain.

There are still important modules written in C and compiled with Nginx. There are also proprietary extensions of the ngx_lua api to manipulate internal some internal aspects of Nginx within the scripts.

source: I wrote a good chunk of both iterations.