Pingoo is an MIT-licensed load balancer, API gateway and reverse proxy written in Rust that runs on your own servers and bundles service discovery, GeoIP, a web application firewall, bot protection and post-quantum TLS behind a single Docker image.

What it is

Pingoo is a modern Load Balancer, API Gateway and Reverse Proxy distributed as the Docker image pingooio/pingoo, written in Rust under the MIT licence, with no Open Core or "Enterprise Edition" split. It terminates automatic and post-quantum HTTPS/TLS, discovers backends through Docker and DNS, proxies both HTTP and raw TCP traffic, resolves GeoIP data by country and ASN, serves static sites, and includes a Web Application Firewall alongside bot protection and management.

The concrete problem it addresses is the state of open source load balancers and reverse proxies, which Pingoo's README describes as stuck in the past century with a very slow pace of development and most of the important features reserved for "Enterprise Editions". That gap pushes developers toward third-party cloud services, which the README argues exposes their users' traffic to legal, security and reliability risks. Pingoo lives in the same ecosystem as nginx, HAProxy and Apache2, and in the same space as managed edge services such as Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai, replacing the combination of a self-hosted proxy plus one or more external cloud services with a single binary you operate yourself.

Key capabilities

• Automatic and post-quantum HTTPS/TLS termination.
• Service discovery for backends through Docker and DNS.
• Web Application Firewall (WAF) built into the proxy.
• Bot protection and management, with anti-bot and captcha listed among the project topics.
• TCP proxying for non-HTTP traffic.
• GeoIP enrichment by country and ASN.
• Static site hosting directly from a mounted www folder.

Who uses it and how

• Teams that need a WAF and bot protection but do not want their user traffic passing through third-party cloud infrastructure.
• Organisations with compliance requirements, since the data never leaves their own servers, which Pingoo describes as easy compliance.
• Docker-based environments where service discovery through Docker and DNS replaces hand-maintained upstream configuration.
• Self-hosters serving static sites, where one pingooio/pingoo container bound to port 80 and given a mounted www volume is the whole deployment.
• Operators of non-HTTP protocols who need TCP proxying with GeoIP country and ASN data attached.

Getting started

The Quickstart runs the published image directly: docker run --rm -ti -p 80:80 -v \pwd`/www:/var/wwww pingooio/pingoo, after which Pingoo listens on http://0.0.0.0`. Full documentation lives at https://pingoo.io.

How it compares

The facts name no list of paid products that Pingoo replaces, so its position is best read from the topics it is tagged with: it sits beside nginx, HAProxy and Apache2 on the self-hosted side, and beside Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai on the managed edge side. Its distinguishing axis is licence and placement, since it is MIT-licensed with no "Enterprise Edition" tier and runs on infrastructure the operator already owns.

When to use it — and when not to

Choose Pingoo if you want load balancing, a WAF, bot protection and GeoIP on servers you control, and you are comfortable running it as a container yourself. Be aware that the README is short: it covers the pitch and a single Docker command, and it does not spell out operational prerequisites such as database, storage or mail configuration, so the practical detail sits off-repository at https://pingoo.io and needs to be checked before committing to it. Anyone wanting a fully managed edge with a vendor relationship for every operational concern should look elsewhere, and contributors should note that the project asks for an issue to be opened before a pull request, with AI-assisted contributions disclosed.

# You have a static site in the www folder
$ ls www
index.html
$ docker run --rm -ti -p 80:80 -v `pwd`/www:/var/wwww pingooio/pingoo
# Pingoo is now listenning on http://0.0.0.0