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Show HN: I'm rewriting a web server written in Rust for speed and ease of use

ferron.sh

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Show HN: I'm rewriting a web server written in Rust for speed and ease of use

#1

Post by dorianniemiec »

Hello! I got quite some feedback on a web server I'm building, so I'm rewriting the server to be faster and easier to use.

I (and maybe some other contributors?) have optimized the web server performance, especially for static file serving and reverse proxying (the last use case I optimized for very recently).

I also picked a different configuration format and specification, what I believe is easier to write.

Automatic TLS is also enabled by default out of the box, you don't need to even enable it manually, like it was in the original server I was building.

Yesterday, I released the first release candidate of my web server's rewrite. I'm so excited for this. I have even seen some serving websites with the rewritten web server, even if the rewrite was in beta.

Any feedback is welcome!

Show HN: I'm rewriting a web server written in Rust for speed and ease of use
ferron.sh

Re: Show HN: I'm rewriting a web server written in Rust for speed and ease of use

#2

Post by earthnail »

Edit: just tried it for serving a fastapi. It's fantastic. Instant TLS via Let's Encrypt. There may be other webservers that are equally easy, but this one is certainly easier than Apache or ngninx, which I used so far. Love it.

--

Reach out to the guys at Kamal. They wrote their own reverse proxy because they thought Traefik was too complex, but they might be super happy about yours if Ferron is more powerful yet easy to configure because it might solve more of Kamal’s problems.

Not affiliated with Kamal at all, just an idea.

Re: Show HN: I'm rewriting a web server written in Rust for speed and ease of use

#4

Post by nicce »

luckydata wrote: post #3

what are the advantages vs something like https://caddyserver.com ?

It is about min-maxing. If you have backend written in Rust which uses Hyper, for example, Caddy will be bottleneck.

Depending of course from the type of the backend (is it limited by other I/O and Caddy bottleneck does not matter)

Re: Show HN: I'm rewriting a web server written in Rust for speed and ease of use

#6

Post by Quarrel »

luckydata wrote: post #3

what are the advantages vs something like https://caddyserver.com ?

I've never used ferron, but if you look at the graphs, he gives comparisons.

So, I guess, performance + easy of use. Obviously, caddy is much more mature though.

Re: Show HN: I'm rewriting a web server written in Rust for speed and ease of use

#8

Post by k_bx »

I was previously waiting for River https://github.com/memorysafety/river/ to take off, it's built on top of previously open-sourced library by Cloudflare for revese-proxying, but just like many other "grant-based" projects it just died when funding stopped.

I really like the spirit and simplicity of Ferron, will try it out when I have a chance. Been waiting for gradually throw out nginx for a while now, nothing clicked all the checkboxes.

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