The Mercure.rocks Hub is now based on Caddy Web Server

I’m very happy to announce the immediate availability of the Mercure.rocks Hub version 0.11! The Mercure.rocks Hub is a free software implementing the Mercure specification, an open protocol for fast, reliable and battery-efficient in-browser real-time communications.

Version 0.11 is a major milestone for the project!

As you may know, the Mercure.rocks Hub is written in Go. Until now, its built-in web server was home-made. Although this ad hoc server was doing its job, it was suffering from some limitations: few settings, no HTTP/3 support, not much debugging tools…

For this version 0.11, we worked hard to provide an easy-to-use standalone Go module, which can be used to add support for the Mercure protocol to any Go project.

This refactoring also allowed us to write a Mercure module for the popular Caddy web server! Then, we migrated the standalone Mercure.rocks Hub itself to a build of Caddy including the Mercure module.

Using Caddy instead of the home-made server adds a lot of new features to the Mercure.rocks Hub, and unlocks a broad range of new usages. For instance, it’s now possible to use the Mercure.rocks Hub as a production-grade reverse proxy for your website or API, that adds the Mercure well-known URL (/.well-known/mercure). So the Mercure well-known URL is on the same domain as your website, and you don’t need to deal with CORS anymore!

All features provided by Caddy are also supported by this custom build including but not limited to HTTP/3 and h2c support, advanced compression, detailed Prometheus metrics (with additional Mercure-specific metrics) or a built-in profiler (/debug/pprof/).

Check out the project’s website to discover all the features supported by Caddy web server.

It’s also possible to create custom Caddy builds including the Mercure module as well as other modules such as the Vulcain module for Caddy or the brand-new Caddy HTTP Cache module, which we co-maintain with the awesome Caddy team. Consequently, the Symfony Docker and the API Platform projects already migrated to Caddy with the Mercure module!

Before upgrading to version 0.11, be sure to migrate your configuration to the new Caddyfile format.

To ease the migration, we still provide binaries and Docker images including the legacy home-made server. These legacy builds are compatible with the old configuration format, and they are prefixed with “legacy-“.

A big thanks to Márk Sági-Kazár, Tamás Szigeti and to the Caddy team for their contributions and for their incredible help!

Please try Mercure 0.11, and report any problem!