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Built for sysadmins — fast, secure, and easy to configure
Ferron is a fast web server with automatic TLS certificate management, easy configuration, and rock-solid security — so you can go live in minutes.
Watch, as Ferron serves a website with automatic TLS setup in minutes.
The problem with popular web servers
Despite powering much of the internet, popular web servers (such as Apache and NGINX) weren’t designed for ease of use, security, or modern developer experience.
Complex configurations
Have you spent hours configuring a web server just to set up a website? NGINX configs can become verbose, even for something as common as a high-performance reverse proxy. Apache’s directives can be hard to navigate too, with many options that can make simple tasks needlessly hard.
Security concerns
Many popular web servers (including Apache and NGINX) are written in programming languages and use libraries that aren’t designed for memory safety. This caused many issues, such as Heartbleed in OpenSSL, putting servers at unnecessary risk.
Performance bottlenecks
Apache’s architecture can struggle under modern workloads, often underperforming compared to newer, leaner servers. This means wasted resources and slower response times for your website visitors.
Why choose Ferron?
Designed with modern web hosting needs in mind, Ferron combines speed, security, and ease of use in one powerful package.
Fast
Thoroughly optimized for speed with support for high concurrency.
Memory-safe
Built with memory safety as a priority, eliminating common security vulnerabilities.
Automatic TLS
Automatic SSL/TLS certificate acquisition and renewal with Let’s Encrypt integration.
Easy configuration
Simple, intuitive configuration with sensible, secure defaults and comprehensive documentation.
Powerful reverse proxy
Advanced reverse proxy capabilities with support for load balancing and health checks.
API-friendly
Built-in support for modern API patterns including WebSockets.
Experience automatic TLS
Discover how Ferron simplifies the process of securing your website with HTTPS through automatic TLS management.
- Point a subdomain named
ferrondemoof your domain name (for example,ferrondemo.example.com) to either:CNAME demo.ferron.sh or A 194.110.4.223
- Visit the subdomain in the browser. You may have to wait some time for the DNS records to propagate and the TLS certificate to be issued. After few minutes, visit the subdomain again and you will see a securely served webpage.
You will notice how Ferron manages the TLS certificate for your subdomain automatically.
Not working? Check your DNS settings and ensure that the subdomain is correctly pointing to the IP address or CNAME provided.
Fast performance
Ferron can outperform other popular web servers in performance benchmark tests across different workloads.
Quick installation
Get started with Ferron in minutes. Choose your preferred platform and installation method.
Simple configuration
Ferron has simple, intuitive configuration, compared to more complex configurations of some popular web servers.
Popular web server (NGINX host configuration)
server {
listen 80;
listen 443 ssl http2;
server_name example.com;
server_tokens off;
# Assuming you use Certbot for automatic certificate management
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
root /var/www/html;
gzip on;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}Ferron 2.x
// TLS certificate is obtained automatically by Ferron
example.com {
root "/var/www/html"
}Popular web server (NGINX host configuration)
upstream backend {
server localhost:3000;
keepalive 32;
}
server {
listen 80;
listen 443 ssl http2;
server_name example.com;
server_tokens off;
# Assuming you use Certbot for automatic certificate management
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
location / {
proxy_pass http://backend/;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
}
}Ferron 2.x
// TLS certificate is obtained automatically by Ferron
example.com {
proxy "http://localhost:3000"
}Popular web server (NGINX host configuration)
server {
listen 80;
listen 443 ssl http2;
server_name example.com;
server_tokens off;
# Assuming you use Certbot for automatic certificate management
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
root /var/www/html;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
location / {
gzip on;
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php-fpm.sock;
set $path_info $fastcgi_path_info;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $path_info;
fastcgi_index index.php;
# The "fastcgi.conf" is located in the NGINX configuration directory (at least on Debian-based systems)
include fastcgi.conf;
}
}Ferron 2.x
// TLS certificate is obtained automatically by Ferron
example.com {
root "/var/www/html"
// Check if the PHP-FPM socket file is accessible by the web server user, often "ferron"
fcgi_php "unix:///var/run/php/php-fpm.sock"
}What our community says
Don’t take our word for it — hear from the system administrators and developers who use Ferron every day.
I suspect that people don’t like changing web servers, and perhaps that’s why it took the industry so long to move away from Apache. Ferron actually looks great — great performance, automatic TLS, easy reverse proxy configuration and more. Congrats on shipping this!
Yo’av Moshe
Co-founder of Zaraz, acquired by Cloudflare
Awesome 🙂 Best of luck with the project!
Matthew Holt
Author of the Caddy web server
Replacing Sōzu with @ferron_web because the madlad actually went out of his way to do a benchmark when I asked
I just switched to @ferronweb on my pi to serve services at home. Imho ferron is just way easier to configure than anything else.
You may want to check out what Ferron is doing. I’ve been using it for a few months. Highly recommend. (…) Significantly easier to set up than nginx, and by far the most effortless auto TLS integration. (…) Highly recommend using the v2 docker images though. It now uses KDL for configuration, which is much cleaner than YAML. The syntax is versatile enough that you can create a custom DSL of sorts. Ferron uses it to replicate if statements, and uses them to filter access by IP or headers.
Michael Murphy
Engineer at System76 and Pop!_OS maintainer
