A Playground for nginx Configs Goes Open Source

Julia Evans has released the source code for her nginx playground, a web tool for experimenting with nginx configurations that first appeared in 2021. The project is small—the frontend lives in static/ and the backend in api/—but it may serve as a useful starting point for similar tools. Evans notes in the GitHub repository that she would welcome seeing an HAProxy playground or other configuration-testing tools built on this groundwork.

The repository's README is candid about the project's status: it is unmaintained, and the developer experience is not polished. Evans did verify that the build instructions work on a fresh machine before publishing.

Why the Late Release?

Evans explained that she historically hesitated to open source projects because she is "not very good at open source." She dislikes maintaining projects and usually ignores feature requests and most bug reports, which leads to guilt. In the past, she handed off maintainership of two projects she started—rbspy and rust-bcc—to others who now do a much better job.

Other blockers included poor developer experience and project-specific configuration files like fly.toml or analytics setup that would not make sense for others to copy.

A More Honest Approach to Publishing

Rather than pretending she would improve the code later—something she has not touched in over a year—Evans chose a different strategy for this release:

  • The README explicitly states the project is unmaintained.
  • All known security caveats are documented.
  • The build instructions were tested on a fresh machine to confirm they work.
  • Messy parts of the project are explained, though not fixed.

This pragmatic approach acknowledges the reality of small side projects while still making the code available for anyone who finds it useful.