Gun 2.0
2023 24 Jan
Gun 2.0.0
has been released!
Gun 2.0 adds a ton of features along with a small number of breaking changes.
Gun 2.0 includes state of the art tunnel support. With Gun 2.0 it is possible to make requests or data go through any number of proxy endpoints using any combination of TCP or TLS transports and HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 or SOCKS5 protocols. All combinations of the scenario Proxy1 -> Proxy2 -> Origin are tested and known to work.
You can watch a demo of the tunnel support below. This video is the first of its kind. If you like it, or you don't like it, please tell me! I intend to continue producing those on a semi-regular basis. Watch:
Gun 2.0 can now be used to send and receive raw data, as if it was just a normal socket. This can be useful when needing to connect through a number of HTTP/SOCKS5 proxies, allowing the use of Gun's great proxying capabilities for non-Web protocols. This can also be useful when performing HTTP/1.1 Upgrade to custom protocols.
Gun 2.0 adds many more features such as Websocket over HTTP/2, Websocket protocol negotiation, a built-in cookie store, graceful shutdown, flow control for data messages, event handlers and more.
Gun 2.0 greatly improves the HTTP/2 performance when it comes to receiving large response bodies; and when receiving response bodies from many separate requests concurrently.
Gun 2.0 will be more responsive in the event of connection failures. It now checks return values from send calls and has send timeouts enabled by default. For HTTP/2 a new option allows Gun to drop the connection when pings do not get a response in a timely manner.
Gun now shares much of its HTTP/2 code with Cowboy, including the HTTP/2 state machine. Numerous issues were fixed as a result because the Cowboy implementation was much more advanced.
The Gun connection process is now implemented using gen_statem
.
The gun_pool
module is a significant experimental feature that allows users to create pools of connections. Pools are split by authority and a user-provided token, allowing users to reuse connections in a similar way to what Web browsers are doing. Please check it out and provide feedback!
Gun 2.0 requires Erlang/OTP 22.0 or greater and is tested and supported on Linux, 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 now focus on implementing HTTP/3 and QUIC, first in Cowboy and then in Gun.
You can donate to this project via GitHub Sponsors.
As usual, feedback is appreciated, and issues or questions should be sent via Github tickets. Thanks!