Cowboy is a small, fast and modular HTTP server written in Erlang. Cowboyku is a fork of that server used in conjunction with vegur, Heroku's HTTP proxy library.

It is functionally equivalent to Cowboy 0.10.0, with custom patches added in to function properly as a proxy's web server (Proxies and HTTP servers have slitghly varying specifications) and parser.

Cowboyku is not expected to be used standalone. It is rather a fork used so that both Cowboy and Vegur might be used from within the same virtual machine without holding users of Cowboy back. This allows Heroku to maintain a stable proxy, upgraded at a pace we judge adequate for the production applications on our platform, while any user of the proxy might develop interfaces and matching work on a newer Cowboy version as required.

There is no long-term guarantee this library will be used or maintained. Depending on developments in the Cowboy servers and Heroku's Routing team agenda, we might eventually just drop this fork and go back to mainline (or update it) without further notice.

Cowboyku has been updated to run with rebar3 because that's what the rest of the stack at Heroku uses, and for the rare occasions that an update is needed for Cowboyku, it's more trouble than it's worth to use a completely different build system.

make test is kind of racy, and the tests have been polished to try and eliminate some of them, but it's not perfect.

The Autobahn suite does something with python to test websockets. It's disabled by default so you don't waste your life trying to get it working locally. You can run it with AUTOBAHN=1 make test but you'll probably have to get your local environment in good shape first.

YMMV, but you can try this:

pip install -U virtualenv twisted autobahn autobahntestsuite

but if that doesn't work, you're on your own.

The SPDY protocol development is sponsored by LeoFS Cloud Storage.

The project is currently sponsored by Kato.im.