Over the years, OpenResty’s open source community has grown bit by bit right before our eyes. Casting our memories back to 2014, before OpenResty Inc. became a full-fledged company and was instead a seedling idea, we looked back at your involvements in OpenResty. Remembering the last half-decade of the OpenResty Github family, we wanted to share some of OpenResty’s history, and celebrate OpenResty diving headfirst into a new decade.

For those of you who are new: welcome! If you didn’t know, OpenResty is a web application server based on nginx. It also runs Lua scripts with its LuaJIT engine. It was first created by Yichun Zhang in 2007, and you are most welcome to visit openresty.org to learn more about the platform.

Milestones Overview

This is the short version of OpenResty history: In 2014, yearly downloads on Github exceeded 550,000. In late 2015, the first OpenResty Con was held in Beijing, China. In September 2016, The Register reported that OpenResty was the world’s fifth-most-used Web server. The namesake company OpenResty Inc. was then incorporated in early 2017, ten years after the OpenResty platform that started it all was developed, and in a few months there were 230,000 Internet websites running OpenResty. In August 2017, OpenResty Edge, a traffic management service and the first commercial product from the company, was launched. Since then, the Openresty team has also created OpsLang, a distributed DevOps automation language that features native streaming matching and human console interaction emulation, and OpenResty XRay, which provides real-time analysis through non-invasive monitoring and tracing of software application statuses.

For the longer version: we delved into Github to see how our members were developing alongside us every step of this journey. The open source core philosophy of the OpenResty team of democratizing code means that feedback and discussion from the community are of the utmost value in our growing together.

Search Stats — an Increasing Trend

OpenResty has 69 active repositories on Github. The top 10 repositories have more than 1100 pull requests, and the total number of pull requests across all repositories amounts to over 5000. Thank you to the family—OpenResty’s code is more robust with your features.
We are thrilled that OpenResty has been well-liked enough to collect close to nine thousand stars on Github over the years, with a particularly pronounced jump in popularity since 2016.

Additionally, there are currently over 1.1 thousand forks and 4 million downloads of OpenResty.

Moreover, after searching OpenResty on Google Trends, we are excited to see how our community has been expanding over the years.

Contribution Stats — Rising Numbers

To modern day: the month of January this year, we can see the code frequency, and are happy that we’ve provided a productive, constructive environment.

The traffic this past week, collected from Github insights, shows that we have an active community.

And here are the commits over the last year.

Or the last ten years:

Furthermore, you can find some independent open source projects using OpenResty here.

Final Thank You

We are grateful to the OpenResty family for the incredible public, open collaboration on our software and welcome the diverse perspectives of any developer to build more robust code. The mission of open source software is to democratize code so that it remains accessible to any user, for them to utilize and change software to suit their needs. We are committed for OpenResty to remain as such.

We are proud that OpenResty is growing steadily and rapidly in an upwards curve, past linear trajectory. Happy 10 years!