Redbird

What Redbird is

Redbird is a free, self-hosted reverse proxy for Node that routes traffic by hostname and path. Routes can be added or removed while the proxy is running, and custom resolvers can use paths, headers, wildcard domains, or upstream availability when deciding where requests go. The proxy supports WebSockets, HTTPS-to-HTTP proxying, HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects, and automatic Let’s Encrypt certificate generation and renewal. HTTP/2 is supported when SSL is configured. Registering several targets for one hostname enables round-robin load balancing. Docker integration can add routes when containers start and remove them when they stop; Redbird can also create proxy records from an etcd cluster. Its cluster mode generates Node clusters and automatically restarts crashed worker threads. Logging is optional, but the documentation warns that enabling it can reduce performance by about an order of magnitude per request. Certificates are copied to a configured disk path, and users are responsible for backups and protection from malicious access. The project uses a BSD-2-Clause license and can be installed with npm. The latest GitHub release shown is v1.0.2, dated 2024-09-30.