Report generation is a basic requirement for many web applications. When it comes to report generation in Python, we developers usually rely on libraries like WeasyPrint or Puppeteer. These libraries are either slow or use a lot of memory and CPU, which makes them less suitable for generating reports at scale.

Let’s say we need to host some files for friends to access or host an application on our VPS that doesn’t have built-in authentication. In that case, we can use Nginx’s built-in authentication to add basic authentication to our files or apps.