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Dwaar

What is Dwaar?

Dwaar is a reverse proxy — software that sits between the internet and your applications, handling HTTPS, routing, security, and analytics.

How It Works

Section titled “How It Works”
Internet → Dwaar → Your Applications


User visits https://api.example.com
  → Dwaar terminates TLS (HTTPS encryption)
  → Dwaar reads the Host header
  → Dwaar routes to localhost:3000
  → Your app responds
  → Dwaar adds security headers, compresses, injects analytics
  → Response sent to user

Your application doesn’t need to know about HTTPS certificates, domain routing, compression, or security headers. It just serves HTTP on a local port. Dwaar handles everything else.

Who Is Dwaar For?

Section titled “Who Is Dwaar For?”
  • Developers deploying web applications who want HTTPS without configuration
  • Teams running multiple services on one server who need domain-based routing
  • Product owners who want built-in analytics without adding PostHog or Plausible
  • DevOps engineers who want Caddy’s simplicity with better performance
  • Platform builders who need a proxy component for their deployment platform

How Dwaar Compares

Section titled “How Dwaar Compares”

vs Caddy

Section titled “vs Caddy”

Caddy pioneered automatic HTTPS and simple config. Dwaar follows the same philosophy but adds:

  • 5x less memory (~6 MB vs ~30 MB for Caddy)
  • Built-in analytics (Caddy has no analytics)
  • WASM plugins (Caddy uses Go modules, requiring recompilation)

vs Nginx

Section titled “vs Nginx”

Nginx is the most deployed proxy on earth. Dwaar differs in:

  • 3-line config vs 14-line config for a basic proxy
  • Automatic HTTPS vs manual certificate management
  • Built-in analytics vs no analytics
  • Runtime config reload vs SIGHUP-based reload

vs Traefik

Section titled “vs Traefik”

Traefik is the go-to for Docker/Kubernetes environments. Dwaar offers:

  • ~8x less memory (~6 MB vs ~50 MB for Traefik)
  • Simpler config (Dwaarfile vs YAML/TOML)
  • Built-in analytics vs no analytics
  • Same Docker label discovery

See the full comparison for a detailed feature matrix.

Built on Pingora

Section titled “Built on Pingora”

Dwaar is built on Cloudflare Pingora, the Rust proxy framework that powers a significant portion of Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Pingora provides:

  • Async Rust on Tokio for maximum efficiency
  • Connection pooling with HTTP/1.1 keepalive and HTTP/2 multiplexing
  • Zero-downtime upgrades via file descriptor transfer
  • Battle-tested at internet scale

Dwaar adds the user-facing experience on top: configuration, ACME, analytics, Docker integration, and the Admin API.

Note: Pingora is a standalone open-source library. Using Dwaar does not require Cloudflare or any cloud provider.