Gun 2.0.0-pre.1 has been released!

The first pre-release version of Gun 2.0 has been released! Gun 2.0 adds a ton of features along with a small number of breaking changes.

Before listing the features please note that this pre-release includes a fix for a potential security vulnerability! This only applies when Gun is used inside a proxy under specific circumstances. Please see the migration guide for details. Since the issue also exists in the previous version I have released Gun 1.3.1 as well that fixes this issue.

Much of my focus for Gun 2.0 has been improving the support for connecting through proxies. Gun now supports both Socks5 and CONNECT proxies, but most importantly Gun is now able to tunnel TLS connections through TLS proxies. Gun is also able to tunnel connections through any combination of proxies, for example Socks5 TCP to CONNECT TLS to Socks5 TLS to origin server using TLS.

Gun does not support HTTP/2 CONNECT yet but this is a planned feature that will be the main focus for the next pre-release. Along with it support for Websocket over HTTP/2 will be added since it reuses the HTTP/2 CONNECT mechanism.

Other features include the graceful shutdown of connections; flow control for data messages; or event handlers with many hook points for instrumentation and other purposes.

While experimental at the time of the pre-release, Gun can now be used to send and receive non-HTTP/Websocket data. Gun can therefore be used as a Socks/CONNECT client for any protocol. Gun can also use the HTTP/1.1 Upgrade mechanism to switch to any protocol. This feature will be documented before the Gun 2.0 release.

The HTTP/2 code has seen numerous fixes thanks to merging Gun's and Cowboy's code together. In addition Gun will now receive HTTP/2 response bodies much faster than before thanks to better defaults and optimizations.

Gun 2.0 currently requires Erlang/OTP 20 or above and is tested and supported on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows.

A complete list of changes can be found in the migration guide: Migrating from Gun 1.3 to 2.0.

I will have more free time available for consulting or for paid open source development starting from next week. If you are interested, drop me an email at [email protected]. I have gathered that there's interest in a pure Erlang GRPC implementation, and there's also QUIC and HTTP/3 that will be ready soon, for example of projects I'd be interested in working on.

You can donate to this project via GitHub Sponsors. These funds are used to pay for additional servers for testing. We will soon add two Raspberry Pi 4 in order to have some ARM targets when testing. (The Pis are here! Just need to install now.)

As usual, feedback is appreciated, and issues or questions should be sent via Github tickets. Thanks!