WebAssembly: Support for Wasm components and the WASI 0.2 API§

Since the release of Unit 1.31.0 in August 2023 and the announcement of our technology preview for WebAssembly, a lot has changed and happened in the WebAssembly ecosystem.

So we evolved and with 1.32.0, we are happy to announce the support for the WebAssembly Component Model using the WASI 0.2 APIs. This opens the possibilities to run Wasm Components compatible with the WASI 0.2 APIs on Unit without having a need to rebuild them. This is also the first Language Module for Unit that was driven by the Community. Special thanks to Alex Crichton for the contribution!

We are preparing a blog post where we will dive deeper into the details of the new WebAssembly language module. Stay tuned!

Enhanced scripting support - Use Unit-variables in NGINX JavaScript§

Using JavaScript in Unit’s configuration unlocks almost endless opportunities. A simple Unit configuration can be used to decide where a request should be routed or rewritten to by creating the values for pass and rewrite dynamically inside a JavaScript function.

Previously JavaScript modules had access to a limited set of objects and scalars. Now JavaScript has access to all of Unit’s variables through the vars object.

In the following sample configuration, we set the Cache-Control header based on the HTTP method. We do this by accessing the method variable as vars.method. When the method starts with a “P” (POST, PUT, PATCH), we do not want to cache the response. For all other methods we set a max-age of 3600 seconds.

{
    "action": {
        "pass": "applications/my_app",
           "response_headers": {
           "Cache-Control": "`${vars.method.startsWith('P') ? 'no-cache' : 'max-age=3600'}`"
           }
     }
}

Conditional access logging§

Access logs are a great way to monitor the traffic sent to Unit. However, you might find that certain requests, such as regular health checks and automated UI tests, aren’t ones you want cluttering up your logs. While these checks are crucial for monitoring the health of your services or web applications, they can significantly increase the volume of data in your access logs, leading to unnecessary noise.

With conditional access logging, you can define rules to decide if a request should be logged or not.

{
    "access_log": {
        "if": "`${uri == '/health' ? false : true}`",
        "path": "/var/log/unit/access.log",
        "format": "`${host + ': ' + uri}`"
    }
}

In this example we don’t want to log any health checks sent to Unit. As shown in our example, to get the maximum out of the newly added if option, you can combine it with our JavaScript scripting feature, but this is not a must.

The if option also supports simple string validation to check if a value is present in a request or not.

{
    "access_log": {
        "if": "$cookie_session",
        "path": "…"
    }
}

In this example Unit will check the existence of a Cookie named session and only log requests when it exists.

CLI enhancements§

The unitc command line tool is a convenient way of applying and editing Unit configuration without constructing lengthy curl(1) commands or knowing where the control socket is located. Unit 1.32.0 includes two useful enhancements to unitc that are included in the official packages.

A Docker container ID can now be specified as the configuration target. To access the configuration of a local Unit container, use the docker:// scheme to specify the container ID or name.

It is now also possible to convert Unit’s configuration to and from YAML. This can be convenient when a more compact format is desirable, such as when storing it in a source control system. YAML format also provides an elegant way of displaying Unit’s usage statistics without the noise” of JSON.

Let’s combine these two enhancements to display a compact form of Unit’s usage statistics from a Docker container:

$ unitc docker://f4f3d9e918e6 /status --format YAML
connections:
  accepted: 1067
  active: 13
  idle: 4
  closed: 1050
requests:
  total: 1307
applications:
  my_app:
     processes:
        running: 14
        starting: 0
        idle: 4
     requests:
        active: 10

Note that the yq(1) tool is required for YAML format conversion.

Unit is now on GitHub!§

This release is special! Special for us and the Community! As you may have noticed we have moved more and more of our development and planning workloads from our old systems to GitHub.

GitHub is no longer just a read-only mirror. It now serves as the primary source for our source code and tests. We invite you to create issues, contribute through pull requests, or join our discussions. There are many ways to get involved with us.

We’ve also fully transitioned the development and maintenance of unit.nginx.org to the Github unit-docs repository. We look forward to pull requests and issues that will improve our documentation.

Changes in behavior and other updates§

Wall of fame§

Special Thanks to all external contributors helping us making Unit better! With 1.32.0 we would like to send a shout out to:

• Alejandro Colomar
• Alex Crichton
• Andrei Vasiliu
• Chris Adams
• David Carlier
• Dean Coakley
• rustedsword
• Hippolyte Pello
• Javier Evans

Full Changelog§

Changes with Unit 1.32.0                                         27 Feb 2024

  *) Feature: WebAssembly Components using WASI interfaces defined in
     wasi:http/proxy@0.2.0.

  *) Feature: conditional access logging.

  *) Feature: NJS variables access.

  *) Feature: $request_id variable contains a string that is formed using
     random data and can be used as a unique request identifier.

  *) Feature: options to set control socket permissions.

  *) Feature: Ruby arrays in response headers, improving compatibility
     with Rack v3.0.

  *) Feature: Python bytearray response bodies for ASGI applications.

  *) Bugfix: router could crash while sending large files. Thanks to
     rustedsword.

  *) Bugfix: serving static files from a network filesystem could lead to
     error.

  *) Bugfix: "uidmap" and "gidmap" isolation options validation.

  *) Bugfix: abstract UNIX socket name could be corrupted during
     configuration validation. Thanks to Alejandro Colomar.

  *) Bugfix: HTTP header field value encoding could be misinterpreted in
     Python module.

  *) Bugfix: Node.js http.createServer() accepts and ignores the "options"
     argument, improving compatibility with strapi applications, among
     others.

  *) Bugfix: ServerRequest.flushHeaders() implemented in Node.js module to
     make it compatible with Next.js.

  *) Bugfix: ServerRequest.httpVersion variable format in Node.js module.

  *) Bugfix: Node.js module handles standard library imports prefixed with
     "node:", making it possible to run newer Nuxt applications, among
     others.

  *) Bugfix: Node.js tarball location changed to avoid build/install
     errors.

  *) Bugfix: Go module sets environment variables necessary for building
     on macOS/arm64 systems.