Project Karpacz is now Ferron. Note that we are still working on Ferron's website. Read the blog post

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A fast, memory-safe web server powered by Rust

Ferron is a web server optimized for speed, security, and efficiency. Written in Rust, it offers memory safety and performance, making it ideal for modern websites.

Why Ferron?

Free as in freedom

You don't need to worry about issues related to proprietary software, such as backdoors or licensing issues. Ferron is licensed under a permissive MIT license, and you can contribute to its development via a Git repository.

Fast

Ferron leverages Rust's asynchronous programming capabilities to ensure fast request serving. According to our own benchmarks, it performs similarly to a popular Caddy web server.

Memory-safe

Ferron is written in Rust, a programming language designed for memory safety. This ensures that Ferron has lower risk of memory safety bugs compared to popular web servers written in C or C++.

Extensible

You can extend Ferron by loading various server modules, which add various functionality, such as caching, proxying or dynamic content.

Automatic TLS

Ferron supports automatic TLS for public websites via Let's Encrypt, which can be optionally enabled. This means you might not need to worry about manual TLS certificate management, as Ferron will obtain these certificates automatically.

Cross-platform

Ferron can be run across multiple operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Windows Server, and FreeBSD. This means you can deploy Ferron on your preferred platform without compatibility concerns.

Ferron is a fast web server

As you can see on the benchmark results below, Ferron is 12% faster in static file serving than Caddy, and 19% faster than Apache httpd (with prefork MPM). This makes Ferron a good choice for a fast, memory-safe web server.

The static web server performance is measured by running a "wrk -c 100 -d 60 -t 6 https://localhost/index.nginx-debian.html" command on a server with a AMD Ryzen 5 8600G CPU. The web servers serve a default page that comes with NGINX web server. All web servers also have logging the requests into a log file enabled.

Ferron is also a fast reverse proxy

As you can see on the benchmark results below, Ferron is 16% faster in reverse proxying than Traefik, 26% faster than Apache httpd (with event MPM), and 51% faster than Caddy. This makes Ferron a good choice for a fast reverse proxy, without being stuck configuring it.

The reverse proxy performance is measured by running a "ferrbench -c 100 -d 60s -t 6 -h https://localhost" command on a server with a AMD Ryzen 5 8600G CPU. The web servers pass requests to a "Hello World" application built with Express, Node.js, and run with PM2. All web servers also have logging the requests into a log file enabled. NGINX is excluded due to possible misconfiguration.

Frequently Asked Questions

A web server is hardware device or software application that delivers web pages to clients over the internet.

Ferron is a fast, memory-safe web server written in Rust. It supports both static files, and dynamic content (including PHP). Ferron is licensed under a permissive MIT license.

The idea of developing a web server in a systems programming language arose when Dorian Niemiec, the creator of SVR.JS, found its Node.js implementation too slow based on performance benchmarks. He first experimented with various programming languages for web servers, and found Rust to be efficient enough. Then he experimented with building a custom low-level HTTP handler, but encountered conflicts with Rust's borrow checker, leading to lifetime issues, so he used Hyper instead. The end result became "Project Karpacz" (named after a city in Poland near the mountains), and later "Ferron".

The name "Ferron" is derived from "ferrous," referencing Rust's iron theme. Rust programming language is actually named after the rust fungus.

Ferron is a standalone, general-purpose web server. Unlike web application frameworks such as Actix Web or Axum, which are designed for building web applications in Rust, Ferron operates independently as a server. Other standalone web servers, like Static Web Server or binserve, are primarily focused on serving static files, whereas Ferron is built for broader use cases.

You can read the documentation to learn how to use Ferron.