Pound

Spec sheet

What it does

Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTPS front-end for web servers.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Purpose

Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTPS front end for web servers.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Integrations

Optional build support includes Lua extensions, DNS-based dynamic backends, and Perl-compatible regular expressions through PCRE or PCRE2.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Security

The project describes Pound as a small program that can run setuid/setgid or in a chroot jail and does not access the hard disk except to read certificate files at startup when required.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Support

The maintainer directs bug reports to email addresses [email protected] and [email protected] or the GitHub issue tracker.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

License

Pound is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

ACME

Pound supports ACME HTTP-01 challenges and can serve challenge files directly.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Dynamic backends

Optional DNS-based dynamic backends can be built using GNU adns when that library is available.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Extensions

Lua extensions can implement special backends when Lua support is enabled at build time.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Failover

It stops sending requests to a backend when it fails and resumes sending them when it recovers.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

HTTPS

It can decrypt HTTPS requests and pass them to backends as plain HTTP.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

HTTPS and ACME

It can terminate HTTPS and supports ACME HTTP-01 challenges for certificate issuance.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Metrics

A special backend can generate an OpenMetrics telemetry response.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

No caching

Pound does not cache requests; it passes each request to a backend.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Notable limits

Pound does not cache requests, and its documentation says it is not a web accelerator.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Request handling

It forwards browser requests to one or more backend servers and can distribute requests while keeping session information.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Request routing

It can route requests to backend servers based on criteria such as source IP address, URL, or request headers.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Request validation

It checks requests for correctness and accepts only well-formed requests.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Routing

Services can be selected using criteria such as source IP address, URL, or request headers.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Session persistence

Session tracking can use client IP, Basic authentication, URL parameters, cookies, HTTP parameters, or header values.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Telemetry

A special Metrics backend generates an OpenMetrics telemetry response.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

TLS dependency

Building Pound requires OpenSSL version 1.1.x or 3.0.x.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Where Specifiction places it

• Reverse Proxy Software#25 of 337.1