# Pingora — Fast Programmable HTTP Proxy Framework by Cloudflare

> Pingora is a Rust framework for building fast, reliable, and programmable network services. Open-sourced by Cloudflare, it powers a significant portion of their HTTP traffic, handling over a trillion requests daily across the global network.

## Install

Save as a script file and run:

# Pingora — Fast Programmable HTTP Proxy Framework by Cloudflare

## Quick Use
```bash
cargo add pingora pingora-proxy
```
```rust
use pingora::prelude::*;
// Build a custom load balancer or gateway in a few hundred lines of Rust.
```

## Introduction
Pingora is an open-source Rust framework created by Cloudflare for building fast, reliable, and programmable network proxies and services. It replaces their legacy C-based proxy and is designed to give developers fine-grained control over every phase of the HTTP request lifecycle while maintaining memory safety and high performance.

## What Pingora Does
- Provides an async framework for building HTTP/1, HTTP/2, and gRPC proxies
- Offers programmable request and response filters at each proxy phase
- Handles connection pooling, TLS termination, and graceful restarts out of the box
- Supports custom load-balancing strategies and health checking
- Enables building gateways, caching proxies, and security middleware in Rust

## Architecture Overview
Pingora is built on top of Tokio and uses a multi-threaded async architecture with work-stealing. It models the proxy lifecycle as a series of filter phases (request_filter, upstream_peer, response_filter, etc.) that developers implement via traits. Connection pools are shared across threads, and the framework supports zero-downtime upgrades by passing listening sockets between old and new processes via Unix domain sockets.

## Self-Hosting & Configuration
- Requires Rust 1.72+ toolchain to build from source
- Configuration is done in code via Rust structs, not YAML or config files
- TLS certificates are loaded at startup; supports hot-reloading via the upgrade mechanism
- Can run as a systemd service or inside a container
- Logging integrates with the tracing crate ecosystem

## Key Features
- Memory-safe proxy framework with no garbage collection pauses
- Sub-millisecond latency overhead per proxied request
- Built-in connection pooling with configurable keep-alive and reuse policies
- Zero-downtime graceful restart and live upgrade support
- Extensible filter-phase architecture for custom proxy logic

## Comparison with Similar Tools
- **Envoy** — C++ proxy with YAML config; Pingora offers compile-time safety and Rust-native extensibility
- **Nginx** — Mature C-based server; Pingora provides a programmable framework rather than a config-driven server
- **HAProxy** — High-performance load balancer; Pingora trades config simplicity for full code-level control
- **Traefik** — Go-based reverse proxy with auto-discovery; Pingora targets lower-level proxy framework use cases

## FAQ
**Q: Do I need to know Rust to use Pingora?**
A: Yes. Pingora is a Rust library, so building proxies with it requires writing Rust code and understanding async programming.

**Q: Can Pingora replace Nginx for a simple reverse proxy?**
A: It can, but Pingora is a framework rather than a drop-in server. For simple setups, Nginx or Caddy may be easier to configure.

**Q: Does Pingora support HTTP/3 and QUIC?**
A: HTTP/3 support is under active development. HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 are fully supported today.

**Q: How does Pingora handle TLS?**
A: It uses OpenSSL or BoringSSL for TLS termination, with support for SNI-based certificate selection and mutual TLS.

## Sources
- https://github.com/cloudflare/pingora
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/pingora-open-source

---
Source: https://tokrepo.com/en/workflows/9391fa74-4105-11f1-9bc6-00163e2b0d79
Author: Script Depot