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River

Configurable reverse proxy from the Pingora project

Reverse Proxy & Gateways ★ 2.4k stars Medium setup Apache-2.0

River is a reverse-proxy application built on Cloudflare's Pingora engine, providing a configurable binary for HTTP proxying and load balancing. It is self-hosted and configured through files.

Official siteSource code

Key features

  • Pingora-based
  • Load balancing
  • File-driven config
  • Memory-safe Rust

Strengths

  • Released under the Apache-2.0 license
  • Active community (2.4k GitHub stars)
  • Written in Rust
  • Tiny footprint — runs in 64 MB RAM

Is River secure?

OSV.dev has no published security advisories for River's repository. No known vulnerabilities is not proof of security: it means none have been publicly catalogued.

Source: OSV.dev, checked 2026-10-14. How this is measured.

River replaces

Self-hosted nginx alternativesSelf-hosted HAProxy alternatives

Health badge

Maintain River? Add its health score to your README. The badge links back to this page.

SelfHostIndex: 17 · at risk

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   :alt: SelfHostIndex health score for River
   :target: https://selfhostindex.com/app/river-proxy/

The score is recomputed on every nightly rebuild from public repository data — see how it is calculated.

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