Nginx 1.29.0 Released: Early Hints and 103 Response Support

What happened

Nginx 1.29.0 was released on June 24, 2025, according to the official Nginx CHANGES log. Following Nginx's versioning scheme, in which odd second numbers denote the mainline development branch, 1.29.0 opened a new mainline series building on the 1.27.x branch.

Early Hints

The headline feature was support for the HTTP 103 Early Hints response code from proxy and gRPC backends, exposed through a new early_hints directive. Early Hints let a server send preliminary response headers, such as preload or preconnect link hints, before the final response is ready, so browsers can begin fetching critical resources sooner and improve perceived page-load performance.

Security and TLS features

Nginx 1.29.0 added loading of secret keys from hardware tokens using an OpenSSL provider, strengthening key protection for TLS. It also changed the logging level of SSL errors during a QUIC handshake, raising critical errors to crit and lowering the rest to info, and lowered the logging of unsupported QUIC transport parameters to debug, refining operational visibility for HTTP/3 deployments.

Platform and build changes

The release added support for the so_keepalive parameter of the listen directive on macOS, built the native Nginx for Windows release using Windows SDK 10, and fixed build issues with newer GCC 14 and 15 when the HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 modules were used. It also included ongoing bug fixes and improvements in HTTP/3.

Why it mattered

Nginx 1.29.0 kept the world's most widely deployed web server aligned with modern web performance and security practices. Early Hints support in particular gave operators a standards-based way to speed up page loads, while hardware-token key loading and HTTP/3 refinements reflected Nginx's continued investment in security and next-generation protocols.

Related on Skillo

See also: Nginx 1.27.0 and QUIC security fixes.

Sources

• nginx CHANGES log (nginx.org)

Published date reflects the original event date (2025-06-24). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.