warmcat/libwebsockets

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

5320 stars · 1607 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Libwebsockets is a lightweight, pure C networking library providing client and server implementations for HTTP/1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSockets, WebTransport, and MQTT with a nonblocking event loop. It is highly portable from embedded RTOS devices to mass cloud serving, with pluggable TLS backends and event loop integrations.

Use cases

• add websocket client or server support to a C application
• build a lightweight embedded HTTP/WebSocket server on FreeRTOS
• implement HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 (QUIC) communication in C
• share an event loop with libuv, libevent, libev, or glib
• serve secure wss/https traffic with OpenSSL, mbedTLS, or GnuTLS
• build an MQTT client with TLS in a resource-constrained device

When to choose

• you need a battle-tested, security-minded C networking library with a tiny footprint
• you target platforms from embedded RTOS to cloud servers with one codebase
• you need multiple protocols (h1/h2/h3, websockets, MQTT) in a single library
• you want to integrate with an existing foreign event loop

When to avoid

• you want a high-level, batteries-included web framework with routing and templating
• your project is in a higher-level language with native websocket libraries
• you need a quick prototype and C's callback-based API is too low-level

Facets

library · maturity stable

websocket http-server http-client networking serialization cryptography networking web-development embedded-systems developer-tools windows cross-platform embedded iot c websockets http2 http3 quic mqtt libuv libev libevent freertos tls lightweight embeddable linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="warmcat/libwebsockets")