NetGoat - Self-Hostable Cloudflare Alternative (Reverse Proxy Engine)

[!IMPORTANT] NetGoat is currently in Active Alpha. We are refining the core proxy engine and self-hosting scripts for a stable public release. Follow our progress on Discord.

💖 Special Thanks

A huge thank you to Cozy Critters Society and Snow for being our first donors! Their support means the world to us. Check out their nonprofit here: Cozy Critters Society.

“The team at Cozy Critters Society is happy to support the development of NetGoat in hopes that we can help them succeed in making their self-hostable Cloudflare alternative.”

NetGoat is a blazing-fast, self-hostable reverse proxy and traffic manager designed for developers, homelabbers, and teams who want Cloudflare-like features without the cost.

Key Features:

Zero Trust Networking – secure your services without hassle.
DDoS Protection – keep your traffic safe from attacks.
SSL Termination – handle certificates automatically.
Rate Limiting – control traffic and prevent abuse.
WebSocket Support – real-time apps? No problem.

Built with modern tools for maximum performance and developer experience:

Bun for super-fast runtime.
Next.js for robust front-end.
Fastify for high-performance backend.
TailwindCSS for sleek, responsive UI.

NetGoat gives you full control over your traffic, security, and performance—all self-hosted.

🛠 The Stack

Engine: Go (High-concurrency proxying)
Runtime: Bun (Fast scripting & automation)
Control Plane: Next.js 15 & Shadcn/ui
Storage: SQLite (Local-first) & MongoDB

Join our discord for support, annoucements, updates & bugs!! Click Me To Join!

NetGoat is an advanced reverse proxy engine designed to act as an additional layer on top of Cloudflare — enabling premium-grade features, zero-cost scaling, and maximum control for power users and homelabbers.

Screenshots

| Dashboard | Domain Home | | :---: | :---: | | <img src="https://cdn.hackclub.com/019cf11c-0d2d-7358-9037-9f91d43454b4/Screenshot%202026-03-15%20at%2017-16-53%20Me%20Team%20Dashboard.png" width="1670" height="1060" /> | <img src="https://cdn.hackclub.com/019cf11b-ec86-78e7-bca9-a662abbce384/Screenshot%202026-03-15%20at%2017-17-08%20NetGoat.png" width="100%" height="100%" /> |

Features

Anti-DDoS & WAF — Filters like a hawk. Blocks malicious requests, bots, and common exploits.
Rate Limiting & Request Queuing — Your API won’t get nuked.
Auto SSL & TLS Termination — Free SSL with auto-renew.
Load Balancing & Failover — Multinode routing with zero-downtime.
Real-Time Metrics Dashboard — Monitor traffic, bandwidth, errors, and hits.
Dynamic Rules Engine — Write custom rules in JS/TS to handle routing, caching, filtering, etc.
WebSocket & HTTP/2 Ready — Handles modern protocols like a beast.
Per-Domain Configs — Define behavior per site with regex/wildcard support.
Plugin System — Extend NetGoat with custom plugins or middlewares.
Cloudflare Zero Trust Support — Acts as a trusted upstream in Zero Trust setups.
Smart Caching Layer — Custom cache policies per route, endpoint, or asset.

Seamless intergration

DNS Searching — Automatically scans your domains to automatically create a suitable Proxy record
Cloudflare — Manage cloudflare tunnels and more with our UI
Bandwidth Limits — Limit or throttle specific domains or proxy's

🏢 For Enterprise & Sponsors

NetGoat is building the future of open-source edge networking. We are looking for infrastructure partners (Bare Metal, VPS providers, Security firms) to help us battle-test the engine.

Strategic Partnerships: Reach out via Discord or Gmail
Financial Support: GitHub Sponsors | Open Collective

Quick Start

We recommend datalix for cheap and highly avaliable vps'ses

https://docs.netgoat.xyz (not published yet)

Open Source Projects That Helped me Build

Bun - Github - MIT License
ShadCN - Github - MIT License
NextJS - Github - MIT License
Fastify - Github - MIT License
TailwindCSS - Github - MIT License

Star History

Netgoat

Install / Use

README