> On the other hand, the unreadable weird-ass pseudo-XML configuration files

If I have one gripe about NGINX it's that its configuration is a still-half-baked DSL that has quirks you wouldn't expect and when they error you don't get great feedback.

Examples: You can have an if clause, but no else attached. You can't have an if clause with multiple conditions. Finally, "if [might be] evil." 1

You end up writing a bunch of partitioned control flow statements and you're never really sure at what level of config hierarchy they would best be applied.

I love the product but Apache's XML versus NGINX's semi-declarative, hierarchical blocks aren't night and day better.

1 https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/depth/ifis...

I agree with you completely. Nginx's config syntax is better than Apache's but it still feels like mystery meat. Can you use this directive or option within this block? Maybe, maybe not. If not, why? Who knows. It's just not allowed to use map within a location block and that's just how it is, okay?

My dream web server has Nginx's capabilities and Lighttpd's Lua configuration files/scripts. Is that what ngx_lua does? I've heard of it before but never really gave it a look.

With the rewrite and map blocks it is maybe a little easier for you to write fewer if statements…. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47724946/nginx-rewrite-b...

Oh I've used these plenty but there are still conditionals which sometimes require or are most clearly defined with if statements, particularly complex redirects that rely on a number of individual conditions to be met.

I've seen these manifest in the wild as stuff like:

if ($thing ~* (match)) { $setWeirdVar = "Y"; } if ($otherThing = "value") { set $setValue "${setWeirdVar}E"; } if ($thirdCondition ~ (another|match)) { set $setValue "${setWeirdVar}S"; } if ($setValue = YES) { # do a thing here }

As clunky as that is, I've found it recommended in SO threads.

To be fair NGINX config is not better. An ad-hoc grown soup of syntax without a clear concept to govern it all.

I would prefer a simple JSON file any day. Or some Lispy S-expressions. Or some TOML or well structured XML and XSD even.

NGINX makes you learn another lang only for one tool and for a config, which mostly (always?) does not need anything more than being declarative config.

No JSON, please. You can't have comments. A JSON config would a deal-breaker for me to use a server.

Oh gosh, I had to try and figure out an Apache config file some time last year - it was a real slog trying to figure out what was happening thanks in no small part to the poor documentation of their pseudo-XML.

You can do similarly in Apache with the Perl sections...

    <Perl>
    # dynamic perl config goes here..
    </Perl>