HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
slact
nchan
C2009–2025
slact / nchan

nchan

Fast, horizontally scalable, multiprocess pub/sub queuing server and proxy for HTTP, long-polling, Websockets and EventSource (SSE), powered by Nginx.

Web DevelopmentSystems & InfrastructureNetworking
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
10Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Fast, horizontally scalable, multiprocess pub/sub queuing server and proxy for HTTP, long-polling, Websockets and EventSource (SSE), powered by Nginx.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2009-10-16 14:04:11 UTC to 2025-01-02 16:28:10 UTC.

012342009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments20092010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20092009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20102010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

11 sources
KajMagnus·Sep 1, 2016
Ok. Currently this is what I have in mind: NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/download/nvd-rss-analyzed.xml — but initially only for software I use myself. Otherwise there'll be too many vulns. In the distant future: a web scraper that analyzes the CVEs/NVDs automatically. nchan: https://github.com/slact/nchan/blob/master/changelog.txt (an Nginx module) And some JS libraries: markdown-it, sanitize-html, React.js, + more. Perhaps I'll track them via https://nodesecurity.io/advisories if their terms-of-use allows this. Play Framework. (via email list. It's a Scala web framework) Silhouette. (via email list. It's an OpenAuth lib.) In the future: More stuff. I'll try to remember to post an update, if I add/remove something that seems "significant". But this page will probably become read-only long before that.
In Ask HN: Which security vulnerability feeds should I Monitor?
slact·Dec 7, 2015
Nice project, and a curious featureset overlap, too... > We have a concept of "reliable pub sub" [...] Does the redis store you have do something similar (I can not see backing lists in the redis store implementation in store.c) Dig a little deeper... https://github.com/slact/nchan/blob/master/src/store/redis/s... I used lua scripts for all the fancy redis logic, that's where you'll find the backing list accesses. Messages are stored as hashes, referenced by id in lists, along with some other channel metadata. So a longpoll or EventSource client knows its last message id, and can request the next avaliable message as long as said message has not yet expired. Websocket clients don't have this information, and I'm not yet sure how to relay it with each message while remaining content-agnostic. Basically, regardless of the protocol, you
Read the rest
can send a If-Modified-Since + If-None-Match or Last-Event-ID headers and it will resume from that position in the message queue for the given channel. > I see you can do auth upfront but can per-message security seems not doable Per-message access will definitely not be implemented. You could, however, do this client-side by, say, encrypting the messages and sharing keys with authorized subscribers. That's kind of roundabout though. > We don't bother with per-channel URLS [...], we often subscribe to 10 channels on a request, the multiplexing seems a bit limited The main use-case I had in mind for multiplexing is that of a single channel per user, and some shared broadcast channel. It's currently limited to 4 max because I wanted to get this code out the door. Unlimited multiplexing will be supported in the future, and you could trivially rebuild the module to support up to 16 right now (At the cost of some memory per message per subscriber per channel overhead). > When we subscribe to a channel due to the "reliable" nature of the store we are able to tell the server what the last id is we subscribed to and catch up from there Yep, Nchan does that too. (except for Websocket, and hopefully I'll find a workaround) How does that work for feature parity?
In Show HN: Nchan – a pub/sub server as an Nginx module
bham·Nov 23, 2009
I just had some time to scan your repository on GitHub and noticed this: http://github.com/slact/nginx_http_push_module/commit/6823f7... Though it just looks like a stub for now. Also, I read the following here: http://github.com/slact/nginx_http_push_module/issues/unread... "Meanwhile, you can use your application to do the authenticating, and generate ids for already-authenticated clients from a large enough (> 2^128) keyspace for security." So, there, I did my homework.
In Nginx HTTP Push Module

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.