Cowboy 2.0 released | Hacker News Reader

Cowboy 2.0 released

ninenines.eu

275 pointstiffanyh35 comments

For those wondering what this is, I grabbed this from the zip file:

= Cowboy

Cowboy is a small, fast and modern HTTP server for Erlang/OTP.

== Goals

Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings.

Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang.

Because it uses Ranch for managing connections, Cowboy can easily be embedded in any other application.

Cowboy is clean and well tested Erlang code.

== Online documentation

* https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide[User guide] * https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/manual[Function reference]

== Offline documentation

* While still online, run `make docs` * User guide available in `doc/` in PDF and HTML formats * Function reference man pages available in `doc/man3/` and `doc/man7/` * Run `make install-docs` to install man pages on your system * Full documentation in Asciidoc available in `doc/src/` * Examples available in `examples/`

== Getting help

* Official IRC Channel: #ninenines on irc.freenode.net * https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy/issues[Issues tracker] * https://ninenines.eu/services[Commercial Support]

"Cowboy is a small, fast and modern HTTP server for Erlang/OTP"

It could really use this line on the linked page for people (me) that never heard of Cowboy in the first place. HTTP/2.0 gave me a clue, but plenty of client software that has HTTP/2.0 support too.

To be fair if you go to the main website it does give you that information, I feel like it would be redundant to put it on every single page.

If anybody else is getting lost in the woods, hunting for change logs, this is the best I found: https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/migrating_from...

Thanks! Was looking for that.

Good news. So it means HTTP/2 support is incomming for https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug :)

Yeah had the same thought, I was thinking "Cowboy, Cowboy, why does that sound familiar..." Then the purple Elixir related light-bulb kicked on.

After reading about tls 1.2 sessions[s], I wanted to see how easy/hard it would be to a) run tls 1.2 without session tickets, and/or force tls 1.3+ -- the closest I came was:

[ed: moved the link up, for less confusing flow] http://erlang.org/doc/apps/ssl/ssl_protocol.html#id61195

which isn't all that enlightening to someone not familiar with Erlang. Does anyone know of a "best security practices" particularly for cowboy/opp/erlang and/or elixir?

I'm reminded of how for the longest time ssl was completely broken in python (it wasn't at all obvious how to force verification of certificates - especially for new developers)... And I've grudgingly come to accept that tls/http2 is complex enough that beyond getting to "it works" - even foolproof libraries need a couple of lines of text discussing trade-offs (eg. security vs performance vs ease-of multi-server deployment of session resumption).

[s] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15358446

I found this link handy: https://gist.github.com/ferd/af9abf6b3600d2d7f08dba58fdfb514...

There's certainly a lot of room for improved documentation in this area. I'd even buy a book on this topic.

I assume that this is the same cowboy server that provides the Heroku routing layer. Does this mean anything for our Heroku apps?

As far as I've seen, it used to be a heavily modified version of cowboy v1 [1]. I'm not sure what they're using now.

[1]: https://github.com/heroku/cowboyku

HTTP headers still say "Server: Cowboy" and "Via: 1.1 vegur", so vegur+cowboyku+custom code.

Don't worry, heroku can barely manage to deploy docker containers into their specialized stack (try it, it's fun and massively disappointing if you have a worker process). This won't affect your heroku apps because they'll basically never be able to upgrade their routing layer. Evidence: their routing layer is already horrendously broken and has been since 2012.

Hhehe

This is great news. Congrats to the Cowboy devs!

Do a lot of people that run Phoenix apps in production expose cowboy directly to the public?

I'm always putting them either behind nginx or Amazon ALB, both of which support http/2.

Time to Erlang Again!

Or Elixir

I must be a rarity because I prefer the Erlang syntax over Elixir.

Macros are a big plus for elixir though

I always feel I'm alone in this world. Erlang syntax is short and way easier to read compare to Elixir(due to its close to Ruby).

Are there any release notes? There does not seem to be any on the GitHub page.

If you're interested in working with cowboy, we use it extensively at Finix, directly from Erlang as well as through Phoenix from Elixir. My email is cGF0cmljaytobkBmaW5peHBheW1lbnRzLmNvbQ==

Awesome Cieplak, best of luck to you and the team @ Finix!

Thanks Ali! Miss working with you dude

wow encoded email. such amaze. very impress

Sorry. Not trying to impress anyone. Just a simple filter. I love working with Erlang and want to meet other people who do too. Recruiters usually don't immediately recognize which base it is :)

This is awesome! Can't wait to use websocket compression.

Can this be used to proxy requests from a downstream server, ie reverse cowboy?

FYI :) since it is not obvious, this is Elixir server that is used for Phoenix among other things. So, big news. I didn't follow it much but it seems they support http/2 etc.

s/Elixir server/Erlang application/

Small detail but it's an Erlang/OTP application which supports building HTTP, HTTP/2, and web socket services on top of Ranch (a TCP connection management library by the same author). Ranch makes it easy to manage TLS setup as well as connection pool tuning to fit your load profile, keeping latency reliable and low.

Since it's built as an OTP application, it's pretty easy to drop this into any release, including something built using Elixir (commonly via Plug), LFE, Alpaca, and/or plain Erlang.

whohoo! thanks for all your hard work on this!

Worth mentioning that Cowboy is pretty much a one man show: Loïc Hoguin

This always fills me with awe and dread at the same time (technically speaking the "awe" should cover the "dread" part but nobody uses it that way these days).

I'm in awe at the achievement, and combination of vision, drive, knowledge, and skills that the maintainer must possess (or even more inspiring: has built up along the way).

I dread the bus factor[0], or the more common weaker form of "maintainer is forced to move on from this project or just loses interest before someone else takes over and is worked in, and a lot of necessary tacit knowledge[1] is lost in the hand-over".

EDIT: Actually, I'm one to talk, working as the sole programmer at a research group... Given the required optimizations for its niche my code gets pretty hairy. I should plan a few weeks of pure cleanup and extra commenting, and general documentation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

The announcement, including highlights:

https://ninenines.eu/articles/cowboy-2.0.0/

Full changes: https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/migrating_from...

By the power of grayskull I invoke dang to update the link.

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