varnish/hitch

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1943 stars · 157 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Hitch is a scalable TLS/SSL termination proxy written in C by Varnish Software. It decrypts TLS connections and forwards unencrypted traffic to backend servers, efficiently handling tens of thousands of connections on multicore machines.

Use cases

• terminate TLS/SSL connections in front of a backend server
• offload SSL decryption from application servers
• add HTTPS support to a plain HTTP backend
• handle tens of thousands of concurrent TLS connections efficiently
• pair a TLS proxy with Varnish Cache or HAProxy
• scale TLS termination across multicore machines

When to choose

• you need high-performance TLS termination with low overhead
• your backend cannot handle TLS itself and you want a dedicated proxy layer
• you run Varnish Cache and need an SSL frontend
• you want a lightweight, C-based proxy focused solely on TLS offloading

When to avoid

• you need full HTTP-level features like caching, routing, or load balancing in the same component
• you want a general-purpose reverse proxy with rich configuration
• you need TLS termination with built-in WAF or application-layer security features

Facets

service · maturity active

proxy security networking http-server networking security web-development infrastructure-as-code cross-platform cli tls-termination ssl-offloading high-performance c varnish load-balancing linux

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="varnish/hitch")