Abel is a lightweight microservices framework for Lua. It focuses on simple, fun experience of writing modular web services.

See Documentation and Roadmap for more information.

Abel is currently under heavy development, and many functionalities are yet to be implemented. Nevertheless, feel free to try it out, and any feedback would be appreciated!

You want Abel when:

• you are tired of compiling, packaging, logging in, and deploying even the simpliest service you write on your server;
• you want to Cloudflare Workers, but self-hosted;
• you want an out-of-the-box experience of writing and deploying web services.

You don't want Abel when:

• you build complex web services; (maybe one day it can do so too?)
• performance is your main goal; (still decent performance though)
• you want to access the entire filesystem, spawn child processes or use FFI libraries.

Write a hello world service and save it to hello.lua:

abel.listen("/:name", function(req)
  return { greeting = "Hello, " .. req.params.name .. "!" }
end)

Run Abel:

$ cargo run -- dev hello.lua
 INFO  abel > Starting abel-server v0.1.0 (dev mode)
 INFO  abel::server > Loaded service (0b684ecb-029e-40ee-8757-9f34fdc2e662)
 INFO  abel::server > Abel is listening to 127.0.0.1:3000

In another shell, run the service:

$ curl localhost:3000/hello/world | jq
{
  "greeting": "Hello, world!"
}

Deploy the service in one request:

$ curl https://abel.example.com/services/hello \
  -H "Authorization: Abel <your-auth-token>" \
  -X PUT \
  -F single=@hello.lua | jq
{
  "new_service": {
    "name": "hello",
    // ...
  }
}

$ curl https://abel.example.com/hello/server | jq
{
  "greeting": "Hello, server!"
}

Abel currently uses Lua 5.4 as its runtime. Lower versions and LuaJIT support is under consideration for now.

Abel is licensed under the MIT License.