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Traefik

Cloud-native HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer for microservices

65k Go MIT today

Overview

Traefik is a modern reverse proxy and load balancer written in Go, designed for dynamic microservice environments. It automatically discovers service configurations from Docker, Kubernetes, Consul, and other providers, generates Let's Encrypt TLS certificates automatically, and exposes a real-time dashboard and metrics. It supports HTTP, TCP, and UDP, with middleware for rate limiting, authentication, circuit breaking, and tracing.

Setup and operations guides

Use these practical guides to plan the deployment, security, backups, and recovery work behind this project.

Where it falls short of Heroku

  • Ingress/routing layer only; does not provide git-based deployments, build systems, or app management
  • Configuration via labels and providers has a steep learning curve compared to Heroku's zero-config UX
  • No built-in secrets management or environment variable injection for deployed apps
  • Enterprise features (clustering, advanced WAF, SSO) require the commercial Traefik Enterprise edition

We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.

Tags

reverse-proxy
load-balancer
kubernetes
docker
microservices
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Show off your self-host difficulty score

Embed the Traefik difficulty badge in your README — it links back here.

Self-host difficulty badge← add this to your README
[![Self-host difficulty](https://openreplace.com/api/badge/traefik)](https://openreplace.com/traefik)

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