rama-0.3.0-alpha.4

This will be the last alpha release of rama 0.3.0. Besides some minor stuff there are still
two big features that we want to have done before shipping 0.3.0:

• rama-grpc: Grpc support for rama (#488; funded by one of our commercial partners);
• impl a new Uri implementation in rama-net (#724) and make use of that:
  • as the uri for Request, improving that further;
  • replace RequestContext and TransportContext with scoped traits to get
    get info such as path and Uri from input in a stateless simplified way (#724)

These changes will also unlock some other minor improvements that we still plan to do.
You can check https://github.com/plabayo/rama/milestone/2 for the full 0.3 milestone,
Note that not everything in that list will be done prior to 0.3. Some of it we will probably
drop or move to another milestone.

Once the Uri, Grpc and some other minor improvements and feature work (e.g. multi-part support)
is done we will start with release candidates (rc) for rama.
We plan to do 1 or 2 of these with a final 0.3 release at the end of January (2026).

Once we released rama 0.3 we plan to start doing a regular release train of six weeks.
The idea is to release whatever is in main, which will be a patch- or major release depending if we have
breaking changes or not.

Community

Thank you to the contributors of this release: Glen De Cauwsemaecker [[email protected]], Abdelkader Boudih [[email protected]], Nicolas Trippar [[email protected]], M-Kusumgar [[email protected]], Brecht Stamper [[email protected]], Ali Tariq [[email protected]], Camille Louédoc-Eyriès [[email protected]], sim-hash [[email protected]], Irfan - ئىرفان [[email protected]], Yukun Wang [[email protected]], hafihaf123 [[email protected]], Aydan Pirani [[email protected]], Kenny Lau [[email protected]], and MeerKatDev [[email protected]]. We also want to extend our thanks to all the individuals in the wider ecosystem and the maintainers of the third-party crates that make this work possible.

Huge shoutout to Brecht Stamper [[email protected]] for stepping up to help maintain rama and driving major changes this release. His work was instrumental in the service and state API redesign, ACME support, TLS improvements, and Pooled Connections, among many other contributions.

Major Architectural Refactor

Removal of Context

In a fundamental shift for the 0.3 milestone, the centralized Context type has been removed in favor of a decentralized, extension-based architecture. This aligns Rama more closely with standard Rust middleware patterns and improves flexibility for complex service stacks.

• Context Type Removal: The Context object is no longer passed through services. Data, state, and executors are now managed via Extensions attached directly to the Request, Response, or Connection (#711, #714).
• Forked HTTP Modules: Integrated and forked parts of the http crate's request/response modules into Rama to provide native support for our specific Extension requirements and performance optimizations (#696).
• Extensions-First Design: Extensions are now supported throughout rama-http-core for both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 (#706, #727).
• State Migration: State management has moved from Context to Extensions. New utilities like AddInputExtensionLayer, AddOutputExtensionLayer and IntoEndpointServiceWithState
  have been introduced to handle state injection (#685, #720).

During this process we played at some point with the concept of Parent Extensions (#715).
We have however simplified, the concept even further and at this point it is
a list of extensions which can be forked.

We are not yet 100% finished with this design and there will probably be some more minor changes
prior to the actual release of rama 0.3. The biggest design changes around these concepts
are however behind our back.

Input/Output

the Service trait now uses the type parameters:

• Input, instead of Request;
• Output, instead of Response;

This aligns much better with Rama's future but even for its present.
For example service and layers also operate on the transport and tls layers,
where the parameter types Request and Response make no sense.

Added

• CLI & Tooling:
  • Major Refactor: The rama-cli now features a restructured command hierarchy with send (unified HTTP/WS client), serve, and probe subcommands (#732).
  • Stunnel Support: Added a stunnel-like feature to rama-cli to support TLS tunneling use cases (#453, #629).
  • Export to curl: Support for exporting HTTP requests to curl commands directly from the CLI or via service layers (#509, #699).
  • HAR Support: Introduced an HTTP Archive (HAR) recorder layer to capture and export traffic for debugging (#357, #646, #694).
  • Windows Signing: CLI releases for Windows are now officially signed via SignPath.io.
  • New CLI Features: Added probe tcp command and support for the --resolve flag in the send command to override DNS for specific domains.
• Networking & Protocols:
  • Discard Protocol: Implemented RFC 863 Discard service for both TCP and UDP (#718).
  • Fingerprinting: Added Akamai HTTP/2 passive fingerprinting support, integrated into the fingerprinting and echo services (#517, #719).
  • Post-Quantum Crypto: Re-integrated PQ encryption support in boring (e.g., X25519MLKEM768) (#721, #722).
  • OTLP Integration: Added OTLP and subscriber support directly into the core rama crate to reduce external dependency overhead.
  • Built-in overwrite of span and trace logic to make it compatible with OTLP;
• HTTP Features:
  • New Typed Headers: Support for X-Robots-Tag (#382, #707), X-Clacks-Overhead (#620, #734), DNT (Do Not Track), and Sec-GPC.
  • Data Streaming: Added support for NDJSON (Newline Delimited JSON) and improved JSON body streaming (#703, #704).
  • Octet-stream: Implemented octet-stream response support (#718).
  • HSTS: Added an HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) example and e2e tests (#00fff66).
  • Redirects: Added redirect/rewrite/forward HTTP services and layers (#717).
• TLS & ACME:
  • DNS Challenges: Support for DNS-01 challenges in rama-acme and TXT record lookups in rama-dns.
  • Wildcard Support: Added support for wildcard domains in rama-net and better wildcard handling in the DynamicIssuer.
  • ACME Certs: Support for downloading ACME certificates as raw PEM bytes.

Changed

• API Naming Conventions:
  • Applied consistent prefixes where it helps in meaning (no need to apply these everywhere, but where it otherwise is not clear it probably is advised: try_ (fallible), maybe_ (optional), set_ (&mut self) and with_ (self). These can also be combined for example for a fallible setter: try_set. For Setters we also have a macro to easily define these which we also started to use and apply more (generate_set_and_with);
  • Renamed AddExtension to AddInputExtension and introduced AddOutputExtension for clearer lifecycle management (#759, #761).
• Internal Improvements:
  • Performance: Replaced standard HashMap/HashSet with faster ahash versions (#709).
  • Stream Libs: Replaced async-stream with asynk-strim for better performance and DX.
  • Memory Management: Updated internal usage of SmallVec and SmolStr to reduce allocations across the workspace.
    • These dependencies are also re-exported under rama-utils
  • Upstream Sync: Massive sync with upstream forks including hyper, h2 (1xx informational responses support), tungstenite, and tower-http.
• MSRV: Bumped Rust Minimum Supported Rust Version to 1.91.
• EasyWebClient: Refactored to be more explicit with connector_builder and support for jit_layers.

Fixed

• HTTP/2: Fixed a critical bug in H2 emulation regarding window update replay and early frame replay (#772).
• Compression:
  • Fixed gzip decompression issues with empty bodies combined with trailers (synced with tower-http patch).
  • Also provide a StreamCompression version which is recommended to use for compression of streaming
    endpoints such as SSE or chunked encoding;
• Cookies: Implemented RFC 6265 compliance when downgrading requests from HTTP/2+ to HTTP/1.x by merging multiple Cookie headers (#768, #770).

Removed

• Request Inspectors: Removed the RequestInspector concept; all inspection is now handled via standard services/layers (#750).
• UDP Wrapper: Removed the custom UdpSocket wrapper in favor of re-exporting tokio::net::UdpSocket.
• Extension Removal: Extensions no longer support remove(), ensuring a predictable "breadcrumb" trace of information (#715).
• ErrorWithExitCode: Removed as it was deemed unreliable for complex error propagation.