Artful now has NGINX 1.12.0, from the NGINX Stable branch.
1.12.0 incorporates all the changes from NGINX Mainline during the 1.11.x series, and brings us to a more updated state in terms of HTTP/2 compatibility, modules, functionality, and bug fixes.
Among some of the most major changes between 1.10.x and 1.12.x include:
Dynamic modules - the ability to run --with-compat and install a dynamic module into your nginx software of the same version
- IP Transparency - When acting as a reverse proxy, NGINX by default uses its own IP address as the source IP address for connections to upstream servers. With IP Transparency you can instruct NGINX to instead preserve the original client IP address as the source IP address.
- Direct Server Return (DSR) – In this extension of IP Transparency, the upstream server receives packets that appear to originate from the remote client, and responds directly to the remote client, bypassing NGINX completely.
- Better Caching Performance
... and many other changes, detailed in the NGINX Blog's 1.12.0 Release post which details many of the new features and changes.