# memorysafety/river

This repository is the home of the River reverse proxy application, based on the pingora library from Cloudflare.

Repository: https://github.com/memorysafety/river
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/memorysafety-river
Homepage: https://www.memorysafety.org/initiative/reverse-proxy/
Language: Rust
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2024-09-06T17:19:48+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 16/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 66
- inputs: {"age_days": 933, "days_push": 726, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 2351, forks 138 (observed 2026-08-28T04:06:40.353709+00:00)

## What it is
River is a reverse proxy application written in Rust, built on Cloudflare's Pingora library and developed under ISRG's Prossimo initiative to promote memory-safe internet infrastructure. It offers load balancing, rate limiting, KDL-based configuration, and planned WASM-based scriptability.

## Use cases
- replace nginx with a memory-safe reverse proxy
- load balance traffic across backend services
- rate limit incoming HTTP requests at the edge
- proxy traffic with better connection reuse than nginx
- script proxy behavior with WASM plugins
- deploy a Rust-based edge proxy for security-sensitive infrastructure

## When to choose
- you want a memory-safe alternative to nginx or other C/C++ proxies
- you need high-performance load balancing and connection reuse
- you value Rust safety guarantees at the network edge
- you want simple file-based (KDL) proxy configuration

## When to avoid
- you need production stability - the project explicitly offers no stability guarantees
- you need the full mature feature set of nginx or HAProxy today
- you require extensive plugin ecosystems or long-term support
- you need battle-tested behavior under complex production traffic

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: experimental
- function: proxy, http-server, rate-limiting, configuration-management, wasm
- domain: networking, security, web-development, infrastructure-as-code
- platform: windows, cli, rust
- tags: reverse-proxy, pingora, memory-safety, load-balancing, nginx-alternative, kdl-config, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- memorysafety/river (main) score 16

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:06:40.353709+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T02:36:54.880127+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/memorysafety/river (fetched 2026-08-28T04:06:40.353709+00:00, sha 9614d764f117)
  - homepage: https://www.memorysafety.org/initiative/reverse-proxy/ (fetched 2026-08-29T10:17:24.070852+00:00, sha aeb7b17d6989)
  - site_page: https://www.memorysafety.org/about (fetched 2026-08-29T10:17:24.073463+00:00, sha 7756b0cfef0f)
  - site_page: https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety (fetched 2026-08-29T10:17:24.075690+00:00, sha 53af1d492515)
  - registry_crates: https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/river (fetched 2026-08-29T10:17:24.077965+00:00, sha 8860db57093c)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.