Vapor (web framework)

Vapor is an open source web framework written in Swift and designed for Swift development. It can be used to create RESTful APIs, web apps, and real-time applications using WebSockets. In addition to the core framework, Vapor provides an ORM, a templating language, and packages to facilitate user authentication and authorization.^[4]

Vapor

Developer(s)	Tanner Nelson and others
Initial release	January 18, 2016; 9 years ago (2016-01-18)[1][2]
Stable release	4.102.1[3] / July 10, 2024; 10 months ago (2024-07-10)
Written in	Swift
Operating system	macOS, Ubuntu
Platform	SwiftNIO
Type	Web framework
License	MIT License
Website	vapor.codes

Vapor's source code is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the MIT License.^[5] Vapor has been a part of Swift's Server APIs working group since 2016.^[6][7]

History

Vapor 0.1.0 was released as a proof of concept for Swift on the server a month after Apple open sourced Swift and began Linux platform support on December 3, 2015.^[8] Vapor 1.0^[9] arrived in September 2016, followed by the release of Vapor 2.0 in May 2017.^[10]

The framework was rewritten for Vapor 3.0^[11] to be built on Apple's non-blocking networking framework SwiftNIO. Vapor 3 was released in May 2018. Apple cited the speed with which Vapor (along with Kitura) adopted the new SwiftNIO framework on the main Swift.org server page.^[12]

Vapor 3's beta period saw educational material published by Packt,^[13][14][15] Paul Hudson,^[16] Razeware LLC,^[17] and lynda.com.^[18] Vapor was recognized by Swift.org with an official Swift Forum in its inaugural group of Related Projects^[19] in May 2018.

Vapor 4^[20]'s Alpha 1 Release started in May 2019 and the stable version released in April 2020.^[21]

Releases

Version	Release date	Swift version
Old version, not maintained: 1.0	Sep 15, 2016	≥ 3.0
Old version, not maintained: 2.0	May 17, 2017	≥ 3.1
Old version, not maintained: 3.0	May 4, 2018	≥ 4.1
Latest version: 4.0	April 9, 2020	≥ 5.2
Future version: 5.0	TBD	≥ TBD

Legend:

Old version, not maintained

Old version, still maintained

Latest version

Latest preview version

Future version

Source: Vapor Docs & GitHub Releases.^[22][23]

Swift version support

Vapor 4 supports the last 3 minor Swift versions. As of October 27th 2023, this includes Swift 5.7, Swift 5.8 and Swift 5.9.

This meets the standards set out by the Swift Server Workgroup,^[24] of which Vapor is a member^[25]

Features

Vapor supports the following features:^[26]

• Async / non-blocking IO
• Authentication: basic, bearer, JWT, and password
• Cache: Redis and in-memory
• Commands / console formatting
• Content negotiation: JSON, multipart, and URL-encoded form
• Crypto: RNG, ciphers, digests, RSA
• Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control^[27]
• Fluent ORM: MySQL,^[28] PostgreSQL, MongoDB and SQLite
• HTTP client and server
• Leaf templating: HTML etc
• Logging
• URL routing
• Validation
• WebSocket client and server
• Queue jobs