Announcing the redirection.io agent v3.0
We are thrilled to announce the official release of the redirection.io agent version 3. It took our team more than one year of intense work, including rigorous development tasks and extensive QA testing, to complete this milestone release. The v3 agent brings massive upgrades to our reverse proxy capabilities, observability, and overall scalability.
Massive upgrades to the reverse proxy
The overall features of the agent did not change: it remains a reliable piece of software, designed for resilience, performance, robustness, and security. The agent still supports the "server" mode, allowing it to run as a companion to the nginx and Apache native modules. However, the reverse proxy mode gained a lot of new features.
The v3 agent now acts as a highly performant reverse proxy supporting modern protocols, including HTTP/1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3 (QUIC). It features built-in automated SSL/TLS certificate management using the ACME protocol (such as Let's Encrypt), which can be used alongside traditional local file certificates. Connections to your backend servers have been optimized with full IPv6 upstream forwarding support and persistent keep-alive connections.
We have also added built-in MaxMind GeoIP database support, allowing the agent to automatically inject location-based headers (such as country and city) into requests without relying on external CDNs. Additionally, the agent can now compress backend responses on the fly using gzip or brotli. For environments requiring distributed storage, the agent can now persist data, such as rules and SSL certificates, directly to an AWS S3 bucket instead of a local disk.
Enhanced observability and virtualhosts
To simplify infrastructure management, we introduced the concept of Virtualhosts. This new feature allows you to host and route multiple websites, utilizing different redirection.io project keys, on a single agent instance without needing to bind each site to a specific port.
For advanced monitoring, the v3 agent exposes an optional Prometheus-compatible metrics endpoint for real-time tracking of agent health, traffic, and performance. Access logs are also highly configurable now; they can be output in JSON, text, or syslog formats, and can be customized granularly at the Virtualhost level.
Upgrading to v3 and what it means for you
To upgrade, users of APT or RPM repositories simply need to update their repository URLs to the stable/3 branch. Please note that if you use the nginx or Apache modules, they must be upgraded synchronously to the 3.x branch alongside the agent. Our upgrade guide will provide detailed instructions to ensure a smooth transition.
Note that the v3 configuration format is not compatible with the v2.10 agent, so a migration of your existing configuration files will be necessary. A complete configuration example is available in our documentation, and we are here to assist you with any questions you may have during the migration process.
If you are not ready to migrate immediately, there is no need to worry. The 2.10 release of the agent will continue to work for years, and we guarantee backward compatibility at the API level so there will be no disruption to your services. In fact, the 3.x branch stack is already fully deployed and powering our managed instances offer. As for our Cloudflare and Fastly worker integrations, the v3 updates have not been released yet, but they will be available in a few weeks.
Thank you for your continued trust. We invite you to dive into our updated documentation to explore all the new capabilities of the v3 agent!