Developers, sysadmins, and everyone in between will be pleased to hear that the open source Nginx web server will be moving to the main repo in Ubuntu 14.04.

Nginx has been in the community-maintained universe repo up to now. Security updates for universe packages come from the community, so the Ubuntu team can’t guarantee packages in the repo – like Nginx in Saucy Salamander and below – will receive critical fixes over the lifespan of a release.

‘Nginx will sit alongside Apache in 14.04 with full security updates over the life of the release.’

But developer Thomas Ward has maintained a number of Nginx PPAs to keep patches rolling in for Ubuntu releases as far back as 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Thanks to Thomas’ work and the momentum behind Nginx, the increasingly popular web server will now be moving to the main repo, ensuring security patches through the lifespan of an Ubuntu release – in the case of Trusty Tahr, that’s until April 2019!

Nginx’s popularity has been growing steadily over the last decade, rocketing past smaller competition to take third place in web server marketshare behind Apache’s perennial open source HTTP server and Microsoft’s IIS, according to Netcraft’s December survey.

Ubuntu has been a common, and growing, sight in the server market. With Nginx use on the rise, having guaranteed security updates for 14.04 LTS will be a boon for the open source web server’s growing user base.