Open f5.com/products/nginx and the word appears in capitals everywhere: "F5 NGINX: Built for cloud-native apps", NGINX One, NGINX Plus, NGINX Ingress Controller. Open nginx.org and the very first sentence reads "nginx ("engine x") is an HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer, TCP/UDP proxy server, and mail proxy server." Lowercase, even at the start of the sentence.
Both pages are official. They just name different things. The lowercase spelling is the name of the open-source server, chosen by its author and used consistently by the project itself. The all-caps spelling is a commercial brand that now belongs to F5. n.wtf packages the server, so this site writes nginx.
#The project has always been lowercase
Igor Sysoev released nginx in 2004, and the project has written the name in lowercase ever since. nginx.org uses it throughout, including at sentence starts, and the CHANGES file for every release does the same. Netcraft looked at this exact question in a 2018 piece, "nginx, Nginx, NGiИX, or NGINX?!", and noted that the lowercase form also appeared in the HTTP Server headers of the 447 million sites running it at the time.
A stock installation still answers the same way. nginx.org itself, for example:
curl -sI https://nginx.org/ | grep -i '^server'
# Server: nginx/1.29.8
The ecosystem inherited the casing. The binary is /usr/sbin/nginx, the Debian and Ubuntu package is nginx, the config test command is nginx -t, and the packages from this repository identify themselves as nginx-n.wtf in nginx -V output. Nothing in the software itself ever prints NGINX. This site's own header says Server: n.wtf instead, set with the headers-more module, but that is us overriding the default, not the default.
#The capitals came with the company
The all-caps form arrived with commercialization. Nginx, Inc. was founded in 2011 to build a business around the server, later selling NGINX Plus, and it stylized the name as NGINX in its marketing. As the Netcraft piece points out, the company at one point drew the distinction itself: the company was "Nginx", the server it promoted was "NGINX". After F5 completed its acquisition of the company in May 2019, the brand followed, which is why every product on the F5 site today is NGINX-something.
The logo sidesteps the question entirely. It spells NGiИX with a mirrored Cyrillic И, a nod to the project's Russian origins, and matches neither spelling.
None of this is a complaint. F5 owns the NGINX trademark and can style its products however it likes. It just means the capitals mark F5's commercial line: NGINX Plus, NGINX One, NGINX Gateway Fabric. The server that Debian, Ubuntu, and this repository ship is the open-source project from nginx.org, and that project calls itself nginx.
#What this means on n.wtf
This site follows upstream. Prose says nginx, lowercase, sentence start included. Package names, commands, and version strings are lowercase because that is what the software actually emits. The all-caps form appears in exactly one place: the trademark notice in the footer, because a trademark should be written the way its owner registered it.
If you upgrade through this repository, the casing question answers itself every time you check a version:
nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx-n.wtf/1.31.3
The software tells you its own name.
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