Open-source alternatives to Lua Nginx Module

Polka is a minimalist Node.js web framework and HTTP routing engine. It provides a small-footprint server implementation designed for low overhead, mapping URL paths and HTTP methods to specific handler functions. The project utilizes a middleware-based architecture, processing requests through a sequence of functions to handle tasks such as logging, authorization, and data modification. It allows for the organization of these functions into global and path-filtered groups to control execution order. The framework covers core web capabilities including route parameter extraction, request URL

NanoHTTPD is a lightweight, embeddable HTTP server for Java applications. It allows developers to integrate web server capabilities directly into a Java project to handle incoming requests without requiring a standalone installation. The project provides specialized implementations for an HTTPS web server, a WebSocket server for bidirectional real-time communication, and a static file web server. These capabilities enable secure network traffic through SSL certificates and the delivery of local files with automatic MIME type detection. The server includes systems for request routing and hand

Compojure is a routing library for Ring web applications that maps HTTP requests to handler functions using composable route definitions. It serves as a middleware component for the Ring ecosystem, directing web traffic to specific application logic by matching incoming request methods and paths against defined URI patterns. The router utilizes a modular architecture that allows related endpoints to be grouped into decoupled modules. This composition model enables the construction of larger applications from smaller, independent routing contexts. The library provides capabilities for process

Cowboy is a high-performance HTTP server for Erlang and OTP. It is designed to handle web traffic with low memory usage and can be used as a standalone server or as an embedded networking library integrated directly into an existing application. The project implements modern transport protocols, including HTTP/3, QUIC, and WebTransport, to enable faster connections and bidirectional data streaming. It also functions as a real-time communication server supporting Server-Sent Events for pushing asynchronous updates to clients. Broad capabilities include path and content-type based request rout

Swoole is a coroutine-based concurrency library and IO framework for PHP. It provides a system for building high-performance network servers and applications by bringing asynchronous, event-driven, and coroutine-based concurrency to the PHP runtime. The project distinguishes itself by implementing user-space coroutine scheduling and non-blocking IO interception, which transforms standard blocking network and file operations into asynchronous actions. It further enables high-speed data exchange across multiple PHP processes through shared memory management and specialized data structures. The

Pingora is a Rust-based framework for building high-performance network services, including HTTP reverse proxies, layer seven load balancers, and TLS termination proxies. It serves as an asynchronous network library designed to intercept and route HTTP, gRPC, and WebSocket traffic between clients and upstream backend servers. The project enables zero-downtime service updates by handing over listening sockets between processes during binary or configuration upgrades. It utilizes a programmable multi-phase pipeline to modify request and response bodies and headers, and it provides a pluggable T

Fasthttp is a high-performance networking framework for Go, designed to maximize throughput and minimize memory overhead in demanding web applications. It functions as a specialized HTTP server and client library that prioritizes efficient resource management, allowing developers to build scalable services capable of handling massive concurrent traffic with minimal garbage collection pressure. The library distinguishes itself through a focus on zero-allocation processing and low-level optimization. It achieves this by recycling temporary request and response objects through managed pools and

Hyper is a low-level networking library designed for building high-performance HTTP clients and servers. It provides a foundational toolkit for creating network services that leverage asynchronous execution and memory-safe data handling, supporting both HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 protocols. The library distinguishes itself through a protocol-agnostic architecture that separates transport logic from HTTP semantics. It utilizes a service-trait abstraction to decouple network logic from the underlying transport, enabling developers to inject custom middleware for request interception and response transfo

Hono is a lightweight web framework built on Web Standard APIs that executes across JavaScript runtimes including Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, and Node.js.

Oak is a cross-runtime HTTP middleware framework and web server designed to operate across Deno, Node.js, Bun, and Cloudflare Workers. It provides a unified system for building APIs and web servers using a sequential chain of middleware functions and a hierarchical routing engine that maps URL paths to handlers via a nested tree structure. The framework includes a runtime-agnostic serverless adapter that translates diverse cloud provider events into a standard request and response interface. It also features a dedicated WebSocket server implementation for bidirectional real-time communication

Sanic is an asynchronous Python web framework designed for building high-performance APIs and services. It operates as a production-ready ASGI web server, utilizing a non-blocking event loop to handle concurrent requests and maximize throughput. The framework is built to support scalable architectures, offering built-in worker process management to distribute traffic across available CPU cores. What distinguishes Sanic is its focus on modularity and developer-centric tooling. It features a blueprint-based system for organizing complex applications into pluggable components, alongside a robust

Gunicorn is a production-grade WSGI HTTP server designed for deploying Python web applications. It functions as a process manager that utilizes a pre-fork worker model, where a master process initializes the application and spawns multiple child processes to handle incoming requests in parallel. This architecture ensures high performance and stability by isolating application execution within persistent worker processes. The server distinguishes itself through its flexible concurrency models and robust process lifecycle management. It supports interchangeable worker types, including synchrono

FastMCP is a Python framework designed for building servers that expose functions, resources, and prompts to AI models using the Model Context Protocol. It simplifies the development process by automatically deriving tool metadata, input schemas, and documentation directly from Python function signatures and type hints. The framework provides a unified container for managing these components, allowing developers to build modular applications that integrate seamlessly with AI assistants. The project distinguishes itself through its support for interactive, server-defined user interface compone

xLua is a scripting bridge and C++ wrapper used to embed the Lua language into host applications. It facilitates bidirectional data exchange and function calls between scripts and the host environment. The project includes a runtime patching tool for replacing application logic and fixing bugs without requiring a system restart. It features a coroutine orchestrator that wraps asynchronous operations into linear code and a script validator that verifies digital signatures to ensure code authenticity and integrity before execution. To minimize memory overhead and garbage collection, the system

Iron is a Rust web framework used for building concurrent web applications and APIs. It functions as a concurrent HTTP server and provides a stateless route dispatcher to map incoming URL paths and globs to specific handler functions. The project is centered around a middleware-based request pipeline, which allows the request-response cycle to be extended via plugins and modifiers. It utilizes a thread-safe state container to store shared application memory accessible across all concurrent handlers and middleware. The framework covers broad capability areas including dynamic API routing, sta

Werkzeug is a comprehensive library and toolkit for building WSGI-compliant web applications in Python. It provides the fundamental building blocks for web development, including an HTTP request and response toolkit, a rule-based URL routing engine, and a library for managing the overall web application lifecycle. The project is distinguished by its integrated development suite, which includes a WSGI development server featuring automatic code reloading and a PIN-protected interactive browser debugger for inspecting call stacks. It also includes a specialized WSGI test client that enables the

Nickel is a web framework for the Rust programming language designed to handle HTTP requests and responses. It functions as a server-side toolkit that provides integrated routing, middleware, and JSON deserialization. The framework utilizes a middleware-based request pipeline to insert custom logic and state management into the request-response cycle. It also includes a server-side template engine for generating dynamic HTML pages by merging data with markup templates. The project covers high-level capabilities for REST API development, web application routing, and global error handling to i

Vendure is a Node.js e-commerce engine and headless commerce framework built with NestJS and TypeScript. It serves as a multi-channel commerce platform that manages product catalogs, orders, and customers via a strongly typed GraphQL API. The platform is distinguished by its highly extensible architecture, featuring a customizable administrative dashboard where developers can inject custom React components and entity views. It supports multi-channel commerce, allowing the isolation of products, currencies, and regional catalogs from a single unified backend. The engine covers a broad range o

HAProxy is a high-performance TCP and HTTP proxy that distributes traffic across multiple backend servers to ensure availability and fault tolerance for critical services. It operates in either TCP or HTTP mode, with an event-driven, single-threaded reactor that handles tens of thousands of connections without context switching, and supports kernel-level data transfer to minimize memory usage and latency. What distinguishes HAProxy is its configuration-file-first design, where all load-balancing rules and runtime behavior are defined in a declarative text file parsed at startup. It embeds a L

This is a header-only C++ library that provides implementations for HTTP clients, HTTP servers, and a WebSocket framework. It allows for the creation of network services and the consumption of remote APIs without requiring a separate compilation step or external binary linking. The project features backend-agnostic TLS integration for secure HTTPS and WSS communication and employs a thread-pool model to process concurrent requests. It distinguishes itself with a full-duplex WebSocket state-machine and a middleware-based request pipeline that supports regular-expression path routing. The libr

jscamp is a full-stack web development and education project focused on mastering JavaScript, TypeScript, and AI integration. It provides a structured curriculum and interactive exercises covering language fundamentals, frontend engineering, and backend API development. The project distinguishes itself through the implementation of autonomous AI agents capable of complex task automation, such as modifying files, managing servers, and executing API calls. It includes advanced AI development tools for conversational querying, real-time code suggestions, and automated repository analysis to gene

deployd is a realtime API framework and MongoDB backend as a service that allows for the creation of networked interfaces synchronizing data and events between clients and servers. It functions as a JavaScript API middleware that can be integrated with HTTP servers to provide authentication, request interceptors, and realtime capabilities. The project features a self-hosted API management dashboard for configuring resource settings, managing data collections, and monitoring server status through a web-based interface. It includes a realtime data synchronization engine that pushes live databas

Octelium is a zero-trust network access platform and identity-aware proxy designed to secure private HTTP, SSH, and SQL resources. It functions as a secure gateway that validates human and workload identities using OIDC, SAML, and FIDO2 passkeys before granting access to internal applications and SaaS APIs. The system is distinguished by its secretless access broker, which injects credentials—such as API keys, passwords, and AWS Sigv4 signatures—at the gateway level so users can access databases and cloud resources without managing secrets. It further specializes in AI gateway administration,

This project is a request router and web framework for the Go programming language. It provides a toolkit for matching incoming HTTP network requests to specific handler functions by evaluating criteria such as URL paths, request methods, headers, and hostnames. The framework distinguishes itself through its flexible matching capabilities, which include support for regular expressions and dynamic variable extraction from URL segments. It allows developers to organize routes into logical hierarchies, share common path prefixes, and maintain a central registry of named routes to facilitate prog

This project is an educational platform and tutorial series designed to teach the Go programming language through the practice of test-driven development. It provides a structured path for developers to master language fundamentals, concurrency, and standard library usage by building functional applications in small, verifiable increments. The core methodology centers on the test-driven development cycle, where failing tests are written before implementation to define requirements and ensure code correctness. This approach is applied across a wide range of practical scenarios, including the c

Express is a minimalist web server framework that provides a foundational runtime environment for building backend web APIs and applications. It operates through a central application object that orchestrates the entire request-response lifecycle, allowing developers to define routes, manage server settings, and process incoming HTTP traffic. The framework is defined by its middleware-based routing engine, which sequences request handlers and logic blocks to process traffic based on path patterns and HTTP methods. This architecture supports a highly modular approach, enabling the creation of

node-http-proxy is a Node.js HTTP proxy library used for forwarding requests to target servers. It functions as reverse proxy middleware capable of mapping incoming routes to target destinations and transforming request and response data streams. The library includes a WebSocket proxy gateway that upgrades standard HTTP connections into bidirectional streams between clients and backend servers. It also provides a response transformer for modifying bodies, location headers, and cookie domains. The project covers traffic routing management via rule-based translation tables and secure connectio