Feature Reference

Almost everything is in the free, open core. A small set of advanced capabilities is the Pro add-on (one self-host license; included in Cloud and Enterprise). The Cargo flag controls what's compiled into your binary — the standard production build compiles it all in.

Open core — free

Feature Cargo flag Description
Server-side rendering ssr V8 render pool, streaming SSR
ISR caching isr-cache LRU cache with TTL + stale-while-revalidate + tag invalidation
Single-node Redis cache redis L2 cache on one Redis instance
Compression compression Gzip, Brotli, Zstd (sync + streaming)
Auto-TLS auto-tls Let's Encrypt / ZeroSSL via ACME
HTTP/2 http2 ALPN negotiation, multiplexing
HTTP/3 h3-quic QUIC transport, 0-RTT, Alt-Svc
Base WAF waf Rate-limiting, IP/geo rules, SQLi/XSS/traversal detection
Plugins plugins WASM (wasmtime), nsjail, QuickJS sandboxes
Embedded PHP php Custom SAPI, worker mode, OPcache
nginx compat nginx-compat Drop-in nginx.conf parsing + migration
Real-time hub realtime SSE + WebSocket pub/sub, topic wildcards
WebSocket proxy websocket-proxy Upstream WebSocket proxying
Deploys deploys Zero-downtime deploys, rollback
Transforms, SEO, images transforms / seo / image Source transforms, sitemaps/RSS/OG, image optimization
Flow engine flow-engine Durable execution (SQLite WAL), crash recovery
Metrics & dashboard metrics Prometheus endpoint, structured logs, the solo dashboard
Framework adapters & CLI adapters / cli Next.js, Hono, Express, Laravel, Symfony, PHP; all subcommands

Pro add-on

A single self-host license unlocks these; bext Cloud and Enterprise include them.

Feature License key Description
Managed WAF waf-managed Auto-updating rule sets, ML bot detection, threat-intel / GeoIP feeds
Distributed Redis redis-cluster Clustered / multi-region cache, shared invalidation & rate-limiting
Team dashboard dashboard-team RBAC, SSO/SAML, audit logs, long-retention analytics, flow debugger, plugin workshop
OpenTelemetry otel Distributed tracing + OTLP export, request waterfall

Building with every feature

The standard release compiles everything in (the open core and the code behind the Pro add-ons):

cargo build -p bext-server --release \
  --features tls,waf,realtime,redis,otel,h3-quic,plugins,php,nginx-compat
Note

Cargo flags control what is compiled into the binary; the license key activates the Pro add-ons at runtime. The open core runs with no key. The prebuilt binary from bext.dev/install includes every flag.

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