Announcing Crate Community Edition (CE)

Since we started building Crate, our mission has been to simplify how developers manage, secure, and scale their APIs. While Crate Cloud provides a fully managed, globally distributed experience, we know that many developers need something different: a tool that is entirely standalone, requires zero external dependencies, and can be deployed anywhere in seconds.

Today, we are excited to announce Crate Community Edition (CE).

What is Crate CE?

Crate CE is a lightweight version of our core API Gateway, built specifically for local development, edge computing, and self-hosted environments. It’s written in Go and designed for maximum performance with a minimal footprint.

Key Features:

• Zero Dependencies: No Redis, no Postgres, no external sidecars. Crate CE is a single binary that uses in-memory state.
• YAML-First Configuration: Manage your organization, domains, and routing rules using simple, human-readable YAML files.
• Lightning Fast: By eliminating external database lookups for every request, Crate CE achieves sub-millisecond routing latency.
• Built-in Mirror Service: Rapidly test your configurations using the integrated echo server.
• Docker-Ready: Pull and run in seconds with our official images.

Why Community Edition?

We believe that great infrastructure should be accessible to every developer. Whether you are building a small side project, testing a new microservice architecture, or deploying on restricted internal networks, Crate CE provides the robust routing and security features of a modern gateway without the operational overhead.

Getting Started

Getting started with Crate CE is as simple as pulling a Docker image:

docker run -d \
  -p 80:80 \
  -e SERVICE=gateway \
  -e ENVIRONMENT=production \
  -v $(pwd)/config:/etc/crate/config \
  --name crate-ce \
  registry.gitlab.com/cratecc/ce:latest gateway start

For more detailed instructions, including how to configure your first domain and set up rate limiting, check out our new Community Edition Documentation.

What’s Next?

This is just the beginning for Crate CE. We have a robust roadmap ahead, including:

• Advanced Plugin Support: Bringing more of our transformation and security plugins to the standalone version.
• Enhanced CLI: Tools for managing and validating your YAML configurations.

We can’t wait to see what you build with Crate CE. Join our community, share your feedback, and let’s build the future of APIs together.

Ready to dive in? Check out the Crate CE Repository and start building today!