Enhancement - The control panel must always be reachable using a specific HTTPD instance

[hr]
Dear community ;

We can enhance i-MSCP a bit by making it reachable on a different port using nginx. This can allow to mitigate the following issues:

• The control panel will no longer be reachable on the default port 80/443 (by default)
• Even if the engine is broken at some points (eg. if Apache is unable to restart), the control panel will always be reachable, meaning that the users will be able to see what's wrong via the control panel.

You can give your opinion by participating to the related poll.

Be warned: Here, We are talking only about the control panel (i-MSCP). It's useless to talk about nginx as frontal and so on because it's not the subject of this thread. Any post which deviate will be removed

Thank you for your participation.

Refs

• http://trac.i-mscp.net/ticket/1107

@pdias

Running i-MSCP on a standalone httpd instance is really cheap and this could be a great enhancement because this would allow to perform some maintenance tasks via the control panel such as forcing restart of Apache instance and so on...

The memory footprint for NGINX, compared to Apache, is very low and this can also allow further things in future. Also, nginx is available in official Debian/Ubuntu repositories while the monkey server (as far I know) is not.

@jonci

This does not prevent anything (eg, later we will still be able to use nginx as frontal for apache (eg, for static content)) Don't worry

@MyIgel

The goal here is to make the control panel reachable even if Apache is failing to restart.

Therefore

• We cannot listen to the default ports 80/443 using NGINX because those ports will be already used by Apache
• We cannot use the proxy feature from apache to redirect the control panel traffic on port 80/443 to nginx because if Apache is down, the control panel will no longer be reachable.

Of course, If you have a dedicated IP, it's still possible but we cannot handle all cases. Anyway, most of the control panels are not reachable through the default ports (80/443) for safety reasons.