At least 21% of web sites use Apache httpd, and of course many sites don’t report the software used at all. Nginx is also frequently used as a reverse proxy, with Apache used behind it.

At work we use Apache because of mod_shib. We have yet to try nginx-http-shibboleth.

Default Wordpress docker image uses it.

Apache has plenty of life left, it just works™, supports almost everything, and currently is about as efficient as nginx WRT connection handling. Sometimes you want what .htacces gives you. (No built-in Lua though.)

i mostly use nginx lua to patch on some feature i had even on bare Apache, let alone all the core modules.

Why would I not use apache if everything already works with it for me?

Apache has mod_md -- an acme client, which lets you obtain https certificates as easily as on caddy, without integrating with awkward separate programs.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_md.html

nginx has that too https://blog.nginx.org/blog/native-support-for-acme-protocol

My whole selfhosted mess is built around Apache. It was what I started with and I haven't run into any edge cases that it can't cover.

Exactly the same for me! I could switch to Nginx, it's one prompt away probably, but why?

I am the same way. I use Caddy if I can. But I have a lot of docker containers running apache and nginx. You probably might too.

Apache has a feature that no other http server has replicated: .htaccess files.

They provide limited configurability of server functionality within a webroot. That's extremely convenient for PHP webapps. For many PHP apps, deploying them on anything that is not apache means touching the server config itself.

PHP can go to hell. My hair is gray because of it. Nginx is superior, and I can get anything imaginable done with config files. And not to mention, it's much faster.

The http servers drag race finished 15 years ago on a tie, it's really much a matter of taste and familiarity more than performance at this point.

The lazy bastard in me prefers Caddy.

I don't understand this. NGINX can run PHP. PHP is not exclusive to Apache.

Eh. You can use .htaccess in nginx too. I use that everyday.

Does not Microsoft's IIS also have that with web.config files?

I would say that's actually a misfeature as it requires too many additional filesystem lookups to fulfil requests.

Modifying the web server config is a nonissue outside of shared hosting, which should have died out with the advent of VMs/containers.

> … too many additional filesystem lookups …

Caching is a thing. Only dump the cache when a changed is noticed.

And now you have 2 problems..

[delayed]

Yes apache has a config file too amazingly enough, .htaccess is optional