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High-performance reverse proxy for HTTP and TCP traffic
HAProxy delivers ultra‑fast, reliable reverse‑proxy, load‑balancing and high‑availability for HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and HTTP/2 applications, with extensive documentation and active community support.
HAProxy is a proven reverse‑proxy and load‑balancer that handles both Layer 4 (TCP) and Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) traffic. It is designed for high‑throughput environments, offering features such as health checks, stick tables, and support for modern protocols like HTTP/2, TLS 1.3, and IPv6.
Network engineers, DevOps teams, and enterprises that need fine‑grained control over traffic distribution use HAProxy to achieve high availability and resilience. Deployment can be done from source using the provided INSTALL guide, or via pre‑built packages listed on the project wiki. Configuration is text‑based, allowing version‑controlled management, while runtime control is available through a management socket, CLI tools, and Lua/SPOE extensions. Comprehensive documentation—both HTML and plain‑text—covers everything from quick introductions to deep internals, and community channels (mailing list, discourse, Slack, IRC) provide real‑time assistance.
When teams consider HAProxy, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Managed load balancer service that automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets to improve availability
Fully managed layer-4 load balancing service for distributing network traffic across multiple VMs or services in Azure
Edge load balancing with real-time health checks and failover.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
API gateway for microservices
Distributes incoming API requests across multiple service instances, ensuring low latency, automatic failover, and consistent throughput.
SSL termination for web farms
Offloads TLS encryption from backend servers, centralizing certificate management and reducing CPU load on application nodes.
DDoS mitigation front‑end
Filters malicious traffic using rate‑limiting and ACLs before it reaches critical infrastructure, improving resilience against attacks.
Hybrid TCP/HTTP load balancing
Handles mixed workloads—such as database connections and web traffic—through a single, unified proxy layer.
HAProxy supports TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, and can operate over IPv4 and IPv6.
Configuration is done via a plain‑text file (`haproxy.cfg`) that can be reloaded without dropping connections.
Yes, through Lua scripts and the SPOE (Stream Processing Offload Engine) for custom processing.
Documentation is available in HTML and text formats in the `doc/` directory and on the project wiki.
Support is provided via a mailing list, discourse forum, Slack, and IRC channels.
Project at a glance
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