Hope everyone had a great year. Let's take a look at what happened and what's coming. 2019 has been the year of pre-releases with Ranch 2.0 and Gun 2.0 getting close to completion. I hope both of them will be out in the first half of 2020. They were supposed to be released in 2019, but I guess that was a bit optimistic. Ranch 2.0 is a big performance improvement if you need to quickly open a large amount of connections (but you probably don't), while Gun 2.

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You can now reward my work via GitHub Sponsors. GitHub will basically double the funds given to me for one year, so now's the best time to reward my work! I have replaced all BountySource links with GitHub Sponsors because GitHub Sponsors will make it easier for me to know who sponsors my work when responding to issues. We'll see how that goes. Head on to my GitHub Sponsors page now!

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Cowboy 2.7.0 has been released! Cowboy 2.7 improves the HTTP/2 code with optimizations around the sending of DATA and WINDOW_UPDATE frames; graceful shutdown of the connection when the client is going away; and rate limiting mechanisms. New options and mechanisms have also been added to control the amount of memory Cowboy ends up using with both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. Much of this work was done to address HTTP/2 CVEs about potential denial of service.

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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.

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Erlang meetups are resuming and I will be present at the next one in Paris on the 10th of September. As the meetup and my talk about Gun will be in French the rest of this post will be in French as well. If you are around Paris that night, you are welcome to join and chat, even if you don't speak the language! Je serai au meetup Erlang le 10 septembre chez Datadog à Paris.

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Ranch 2.0.0-rc.1 has been released! We are getting very close to releasing Ranch 2.0! As most of the tremendous programming work was done by contributor Jan Uhlig, I will yield the floor and let him describe what went into this great release. In Ranch 1.x, there is only one supervisor per Ranch listener to start and manage connection processes. Under high load (many clients rapidly connecting and/or disconnecting), the message queue of this one supervisor could become congested, leading to declining accept rates or a stalled listener.

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Joe Armstrong passed away a couple months ago. This was a sad day, completely unexpected to me, and he will be sorely missed. Great eulogies were written. My most striking memory of Joe was during dinner at his place after a conference in Stockholm many years ago. Joe was describing his rubber duck debugging method and introduced us to his famous rubber duck. "When you can't figure it out, ask the duck!

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As the year 2018 ends it's time for a short recap and a look forward for the next year. Overall, more than half of all open tickets have been closed. Most tickets were opened since 2015 and I couldn't get to those, but now that pre-school started I have a lot more time! I'm aiming to keep the number of tickets below 100 across all my projects. Cowboy 2.x is now mature.

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Cowboy 2.6.0 has been released! Cowboy 2.6 greatly refactored the HTTP/2 code, a large part of which was moved to Cowlib and is now used by both the Cowboy server and the Gun client. A large number of tickets were also closed which resulted in many bugs fixed and many features and options added, although some of them are still experimental. Of note is the support for the PROXY protocol header built directly into Cowboy; the ability to use the sendfile tuple to send files while streaming a response body (for example you could build a tar file on the fly); and experimental support for range requests in the REST and static file handlers, including an automatic mode that lets you enable byte range requests to existing handlers with what's basically a one-liner.

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Ranch 1.7.0 has been released! This release adds built-in support for the PROXY protocol. The PROXY protocol is a simple and efficient way for proxies to transmit information about the client. While a third-party library already existed, it was not entirely compatible with the Ranch interface, in particular when socket active mode was involved. This new implementation fixes that and supports the full protocol with as little overhead as possible compared to normal operations: just one extra function call.

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Cowboy 2.5.0 has been released! Cowboy 2.5 focused on making the test suites pass. It is now possible to get all the Cowboy tests to pass successfully, at least on Linux and on the more recent Erlang/OTP versions. HTTP/1.1 has been improved with a fix for the TCP reset problem and the ability to stream a response body without using chunked transfer-encoding. Two functions have been added: cowboy_req:stream_events/3 encodes and streams one or more text/event-stream events, and cowboy_req:read_and_match_urlencoded_body/2,3 reads, parses and matches application/x-www-form-urlencoded request bodies.

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Gun 1.3.0 has been released! Gun is an HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and Websocket client for Erlang/OTP. This release improves the CONNECT support introduced in the previous version and adds built-in Websocket protocol negotiation. A complete list of changes can be found in the migration guide: Migrating from Gun 1.2 to 1.3. You can donate to this project via GitHub Sponsors. These funds are used to pay for additional servers for testing. And healthy food.

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Gun 1.2.0 has been released! Gun is an HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and Websocket client for Erlang/OTP. Gun now supports issuing CONNECT requests to HTTP proxies in order to establish tunnels to origin servers. Gun can establish tunnels over one or more proxies as necessary. All existing protocols can be used inside the tunnel, including HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and Websocket over both TCP and TLS connections. Note that it is currently not possible to tunnel a TLS connection via an HTTPS proxy due to limitations in the current version of Erlang/OTP.

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Ranch 1.6.0 has been released! This release sees the introduction of a suspend/resume mechanism for the listeners which makes the listener close the listening socket and stop accepting new connections. Existing connections continue uninterrupted. This can be used to update the socket options of the listener, or to implement a graceful shutdown. To that end a function has also been added which allows waiting until connections reach a certain number.

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Gun 1.0.0 has been released! Gun is an HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and Websocket client for Erlang/OTP. Gun provides an asynchronous interface and will keep the connection open to the server, reconnecting as necessary. Gun has existed for many years as the test client for Cowboy and is now mature enough to receive a proper version. Gun is battle tested by customers and other users but is not the most well tested client there is.

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Asciideck is a new project I have been working on in my spare time that implements an Asciidoc parser and translation of Asciidoc documents into various output formats. The Asciideck parser returns an AST for the document. That AST can be further manipulated should it be necessary: for example you may need to rewrite some relative links if you are not keeping the same file directory structure as the original Asciidoc documents.

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Gun 1.0.0-rc.1 has been released! Gun is an HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and Websocket client for Erlang/OTP. Gun provides an asynchronous interface and will keep the connection open to the server, reconnecting as necessary. Gun has existed for many years as the test client for Cowboy and is now mature enough to receive a proper version. Gun is battle tested by customers and other users but is not the most well tested client there is.

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Cowboy 2.4.0 has been released! Numerous HTTP/2 options have been added to control the HTTP/2 SETTINGS and general behavior of HTTP/2 connections. The options for initial window sizes, maximum frame sizes or compression table sizes might be of interest for optimizing the performance of HTTP/2 connections. Experimental support for Websocket over HTTP/2 was added. Note that browsers do not currently support it. The only browser with partial support is Google Chrome 67 (dev build) started with a specific flag.

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Cowboy 2.3.0 has been released! This release focused on adding support for the functions from the sys module for introspecting Cowboy processes. Many bugs have also been fixed. A more complete list of changes can be found in the migration guide: Migrating from Cowboy 2.2 to 2.3. You can donate to this project via GitHub Sponsors because I need to eat snacks when I write code. Thanks in advance! As usual, feedback is appreciated, and issues should be reported by opening a ticket.

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Cowboy 2.2.0 has been released! This release focused on adding features required for writing gRPC servers and on completing test suites for the core HTTP RFCs. The cowboy_req:stream_trailers/2 function has been added. It terminates the streamed response by adding some trailer field values. This feature is required for gRPC. The max_skip_body_length option was added. It controls how much of the request body we are willing to skip to get to the next request for HTTP/1.

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