HN CompanionHN Companion new | best | ask | show | jobs
Show HN: Sentinel – a Pingora-based reverse proxy (inspired by River) (sentinel.raskell.io)
5 points by raskelll 4 hours ago | 2 comments
I’d been watching River (Pingora-based) and hoping it would mature, because I think Rust + Pingora (from Cloudflare) is a really solid foundation for a future-proof reverse proxy. Progress stayed quiet, so I started building the “practical reverse proxy layer” on top of Pingora myself: config/routing + operational defaults + a way to plug in extra request/response logic without patching the core.

Sentinel: https://github.com/raskell-io/sentinel

River: https://github.com/memorysafety/river

Quick try:

curl -fsSL https://getsentinel.raskell.io | sh

If you’ve operated proxies: what’s one default you’d change to make them less surprising (timeouts, retries, header handling, etc.)?



The agent architecture is clever. Crash isolation for WAF/auth means a buggy plugin cant take down the proxy, which has bitten me with nginx modules before.

Appreciate that! That exact failure mode is why I went with out-of-process agents. A bit like Envoy's ext_proc filter. Sentinel treats agents like separate services (timeouts, circuit-break-ish behavior, w/ explicit fail-open/fail-closed choice), so a crash/hang in WAF/auth shouldn’t take the data plane with it.

Out of curiosity: when the nginx module bit you, was it mainly crashes, memory leaks, or latency spikes under load?