Ferron is a fast, memory-safe web server written in Rust. It’s also a fast reverse proxy. It can be extended with modules.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- High performance – built with Rust’s async capabilities for optimal speed. It’s optimized for web server performance. According to the project’s benchmarks, it performs similarly to a popular Caddy web server. You can also enable caching in Ferron for even higher performance.
- Memory-safe – built with Rust, which is a programming language offering memory safety. This ensures that Ferron has lower risk of memory safety bugs compared to popular web servers written in C or C++.
- Extensibility – modular architecture for easy customization.
- Secure – focus on robust security practices and safe concurrency.
- Supports automatic TLS via Let’s Encrypt, and TLS-ALPN-01 and HTTP-01 (Ferron 1.1.0 and newer) ACME challenges. Enable automatic TLS for public websites via Let’s Encrypt in Ferron, which can save you from the hassle of manual TLS certificate management. With this, Ferron will automatically obtain the certificates for you.
- Easy to configure – get up and running fast with straightforward configuration options that save you time and let you focus on what matters. You also don’t need to worry much about securing your web server, since Ferron enables secure configuration by default.
- Supports running PHP scripts either with a cgi module (using PHP-CGI) or with a fcgi module (using either PHP-CGI configured as a FastCGI server or PHP-FPM).
- Extensibility with modules:
- The following modules are built into Ferron and are enabled by default:
- cache – this module enables server response caching.
- cgi – this module enables the execution of CGI programs.
- fauth – this module enables authentication forwarded to the authentication server.
- fcgi – this module enables the support for connecting to FastCGI servers.
- fproxy – this module enables forward proxy functionality.
- rproxy – this module enables reverse proxy functionality.
- scgi – this module enables the support for connecting to SCGI servers.
- The following modules are built into Ferron, but are disabled by default:
- asgi – this module enables the support for ASGI web applications.
- example – this module responds with “Hello World!” for “/hello” request paths.
- wsgi – this module enables the support for WSGI web applications.
- wsgid – this module enables the support for WSGI web applications running on a pre-forked worker pool
- The following modules are built into Ferron and are enabled by default:
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows.
Website: ferron.sh
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Ferron
License: MIT License
Ferron is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Web Servers | |
|---|---|
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server powering the top web sites |
| Apache | Like nginx, Apache is a hugely popular web server |
| Caddy | Powerful, enterprise-ready web server written in Go |
| Lwan | Experimental, scalable, high performance HTTP server |
| H2O | Optimized HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 server |
| Tengine | Distribution of nginx |
| lighttpd | Fast, compliant and very flexible low memory footprint web server |
| Ferron | Web server optimized for speed, security and efficiency |
| Angie | Scalable web server that was forked from nginx |
| Algernon | Small self-contained pure-Go web server |
| Node.js | Server-side JavaScript environment for network applications |
| Hiawatha | Web server that focuses on security |
| OpenLiteSpeed | Lightweight HTTP server |
| rwasa | Full-featured high performance web server |
| devd | Local web server for developers |
| Cherokee | Fast, flexible and embeddable web server |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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I use nginx. There’s nothing better.