cadish

README

cadish

One binary: HTTP caching, TLS/ACME, load balancing, and Kubernetes ingress.

cadish is a single-binary HTTP cache server written in Go. It replaces the reverse-proxy + cache + load-balancer + ingress stack you normally chain together with one process and one config file:

• Cache — two-tier RAM + NVMe, request coalescing, grace / stale-while-revalidate.
• TLS — built-in termination with automatic ACME certificates. No proxy in front.
• Load balancing — upstreams, health checks, sticky / sharded backends.
• Config — a flat, declarative Cadishfile. No VCL.
• cadish check — a config complexity report: regex-per-request, dead rules, estimated cost per request. Nothing else in the ecosystem has this.

🚧 Status: BETA — ships v1 plus the full v2 directive set. A single-binary HTTPS caching reverse proxy that serves a full production config end-to-end, plus the v2 normalizers ({device}/{geo}/normalize), multi-tenant {tenant} + group inheritance, and replace body transforms. See CHANGELOG.md for what shipped in each release.

Why cadish

Most stacks assemble the edge from separate tools: one for TLS, one for load balancing, one for caching, one for ingress. Each is excellent on its own, but running them together means several processes, several config languages, and glue code in between.

cadish does those jobs in one binary, driven by one declarative config: TLS termination with ACME, load balancing, HTTP caching (RAM and NVMe, local and at the edge), and Kubernetes ingress. The config language stays small and covers real-world use cases first. New ones are welcome as long as they don't cost performance, because speed is a hard constraint, not an afterthought.

Example Cadishfile

example.com, *.example.com {
    tls { acme you@example.com }

    cache { ram 10GiB; disk /var/cache/cadish 2TiB }

    upstream web {
        to      https://origin.example.com
        sticky  by cookie PHPSESSID else client_ip
        health  GET / expect 301 interval 5s
    }

    @nocache path /panel/* /private/* /checkout/*
    pass     @nocache
    pass     method POST

    cache_ttl status 404 410   ttl 60s grace 1h
    cache_ttl default          ttl 2s  grace 24h
}

Install

Download a release binary (linux/darwin, amd64/arm64) from the releases page:

# pick the asset for your OS/arch, then:
tar xzf cadish_*_linux_amd64.tar.gz
./cadish version

Go install (needs Go 1.26+):

go install github.com/cadi-sh/cadish/cmd/cadish@latest

Container image (multi-arch, from GHCR):

docker run --rm -p 80:80 -p 443:443 \
  -v "$PWD/Cadishfile:/etc/cadish/Cadishfile:ro" \
  ghcr.io/cadi-sh/cadish:latest

See docs/getting-started.md for the first-run walkthrough and docs/deployment.md / the Helm chart for production.

Documentation

The full docs are in docs/ — getting started, the cookbook, the Cadishfile reference, migrating from Varnish, and deployment. New contributors: see CONTRIBUTING.

Build & test

make build     # go build -> ./build/cadish
make test      # go test ./...
make race      # go test ./... -race
make check     # go vet ./... && go test ./...

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.