Tooling

The set of build, lint, and helper tools that come with the repo.

auto/ — the configure system

auto/configure is hand-written Bourne shell. It probes the system, decides which features are available, and emits objs/Makefile plus objs/ngx_auto_config.h. The relevant scripts:

Script	Purpose
auto/configure	Top-level; sources every other piece
auto/options	Defines all --with-* / --without-* flags
auto/cc	Picks compiler flags per OS + compiler combo (auto/cc/gcc, clang, icc, msvc, bcc, owc, sunc)
auto/lib	Probes for + configures bundled libraries (PCRE, OpenSSL, zlib, libxslt, libgd, libgeoip)
auto/os	Detects the OS and pulls in OS-specific tweaks (auto/os/linux, freebsd, darwin, solaris, win32, etc.)
auto/modules	Stitches together the static module list and emits objs/ngx_modules.c
auto/make	Generates the rules in objs/Makefile
auto/sources	Lists which .c files belong to which subsystem
auto/feature	Helper: tries to compile a small C snippet to test a feature
auto/install	Generates the install Makefile target
auto/summary	Prints the "Configuration summary" at the end of auto/configure

The pattern is: auto/configure calls these in a deterministic order, each one appends to objs/Makefile, sets a few shell variables, or writes a line to ngx_auto_config.h. You can re-read the generated files to see exactly what your build will compile with.

To add a new optional dependency, you add probes under auto/lib/<name>/ (mirroring auto/lib/openssl/, auto/lib/pcre/, etc.). To add a new bundled module, you add an entry to auto/modules and a sources entry in auto/sources.

make

After auto/configure runs, make (or gmake on BSD) is plain GNU make plus the rules auto/make emitted. The default target builds objs/nginx. make install installs the binary, the conf files, and the man page. make modules rebuilds dynamic modules.

CI workflows

The GitHub Actions workflows are linters and metadata gates, not build farms. The actual cross-platform build/test happens on F5's external buildbot (triggered via buildbot.yml).

Workflow	What it does
check-pr.yml	PR shape (target branch, etc.)
check-commit-message.yaml	Runs .github/scripts/commit-msg-check.pl on every commit
check-whitespace.yaml	git log --check: trailing whitespace, conflict markers
check-version-bump.yaml	Catches accidental nginx.h version bumps in PRs
f5_cla.yml	Enforces F5 CLA agreement on contributors
mark-issues-prs-stale.yaml	Stale-bot: comments on long-idle issues/PRs
new-issue-welcome.yaml	Posts a welcome on first-time issuer
buildbot.yml	Webhook to F5's external buildbot infrastructure

The workflow scripts live in .github/scripts/ (currently commit-msg-check.pl).

contrib/

Small ancillary tools shipped with the source:

Path	Purpose
contrib/geo2nginx.pl	Convert a CSV IP-to-country list into a geo directive
contrib/unicode2nginx/	Convert Unicode tables into the charset_map format
contrib/vim/	Vim syntax highlighting for nginx.conf

docs/

The XML/XSLT toolchain that builds the public website at nginx.org/en/docs and the man page. Contributors who change a directive's behavior are expected to update the corresponding XML in docs/xml/. The toolchain isn't required for compiling nginx itself.

docs/
├── GNUmakefile
├── dtd/
├── html/        # generated HTML output (not committed)
├── man/         # nroff source for nginx.8
├── xml/         # XML source for the website
├── xsls/        # XSLT stylesheets
└── xslt/

Editor support

There's no .editorconfig and the project does not use clang-format. The whitespace-check workflow is the de facto formatter — if git log --check is happy, the patch is clean.

For Vim: contrib/vim/ provides syntax highlighting + filetype detection for nginx.conf. There's nothing comparable for the C source.

Optional / external

• valgrind — works on debug builds; useful for connection-pool leak chasing.
• AddressSanitizer / UBSan — pass through --with-cc-opt='-fsanitize=...' and --with-ld-opt='-fsanitize=...'.
• clang static analyzer (scan-build) — runs cleanly on the codebase.
• Coverity Scan — F5 has historically run Coverity against mainline; results aren't public.

Versioning

The version constant NGINX_VERSION lives in src/core/nginx.h. A version bump is a one-line PR before each release tag. The check-version-bump.yaml workflow guards against accidental edits to that line in feature PRs.