As a developer, have you ever been troubled by the following issues?
- SQL injection, XSS attacks, and database leaks compromising your website
- Malicious bots scraping your data, overwhelming your server bandwidth
- Bruteforce, DDoS attacks causing system downtime
- Expensive third-party WAFs with questionable data privacy
If so, SafeLine might just be the solution you're looking for. This open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF) is self-hosted, incredibly efficient, and has been deployed on over 470,000 systems, protecting over 1 million websites globally. With daily traffic processing exceeding 30 billion HTTP requests, its performance has been proven in real-world scenarios!
1. Introduction to SafeLine
SafeLine is a simple yet powerful open-source WAF that defends your web services from cyber attacks. It functions as a barrier between your web application and the internet by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic. SafeLine blocks a wide variety of attacks such as:
- SQL Injection
- Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
- Code Injection
- Command Injection
- CRLF Injection
- LDAP Injection
- XPath Injection
- Remote Code Execution (RCE)
- XML External Entity (XXE)
- Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
- Path Traversal
- Backdoor Attacks
- Brute Force and CC Attacks
- Scraping Bots
2. How SafeLine Works
SafeLine functions as a reverse proxy, intercepting all traffic between your web services and the internet. By deploying SafeLine in front of your web services, you can set up a protective barrier that stops malicious HTTP traffic before it reaches your application.
3. Key Features
1. Web Attack Protection
SafeLine defends against all major web application attacks, including:
- SQL Injection, XSS, Code Injection, OS Command Injection, CRLF Injection, XXE, SSRF, Path Traversal, and more.
2. Rate Limiting
SafeLine lets you limit the frequency of user access, protecting against CC attacks, brute-force login attempts, and traffic spikes.
3. Human Verification
The majority of traffic on the internet comes from automated bots, scrapers, and vulnerability scanners. SafeLine’s human verification feature ensures that only real users can access your site, while blocking malicious bots.
4. Authentication
SafeLine offers an identity authentication feature to solve unauthorized access issues. By requiring users to enter a configured username and password, you can prevent unauthorized access to your website.
5. Dynamic Protection
SafeLine introduces dynamic protection by obfuscating HTML and JavaScript on the fly. This ensures that every visit to your web pages presents a unique and encrypted version of the content, making it difficult for bots to parse and scrape.
4. User Interface
Security Dashboard
SafeLine provides a comprehensive dashboard that includes:
- Security Status: Real-time updates on active attacks and blocked requests.
- Protection Coverage: A detailed view of which applications are being protected.
- Attack Logs: Insights into specific attack types, source IPs, and more.
Rate Limiting and Human Verification
These features are directly integrated into the dashboard, allowing you to easily configure and monitor their performance in real-time.
5. Protection Performance
As an established open-source WAF, SafeLine delivers excellent performance in comparison to other similar tools. According to official tests, SafeLine can handle a detection rate of 71% for web attacks, with a false positive rate of just 0.07%. This high detection rate makes it a reliable solution for web security.
6. Installation Methods
SafeLine offers multiple installation methods depending on your environment. The requirements for installation are as follows:
System Requirements
- Operating System: Linux
- CPU Architecture: x86_64 or ARM64 (x86_64 must support SSSE3, AVX2 recommended)
- Software Requirements: Docker 20.10.14+ and Docker Compose 2.0.0+
- Minimum Resources: 1 CPU core, 1 GB of RAM, 5 GB disk space
Installation Options
-
Automatic Installation (Recommended for Beginners)
- Run a single command to install SafeLine easily:
bash -c "$(curl -fsSLk https://waf-ce.chaitin.cn/release/latest/manager.sh)"
After this command, SafeLine will be installed and you can access the dashboard via:
https://<your-server-ip>:9443/
- Manual Installation
- If you’re familiar with Linux and Docker, you can manually set up SafeLine using the detailed guides provided in the official documentation.
- Manual Install Docs: Link
- Offline Installation
- For environments that cannot connect to the internet, SafeLine offers an offline installation package.
- Offline Install Docs: Link
Quick Installation Time
Using the automatic installation method, SafeLine can be up and running in under 3 minutes.
If you're tired of battling web application vulnerabilities and costly, opaque third-party WAF solutions, SafeLine is the open-source, self-hosted solution you need. It provides powerful protection from a wide range of attacks, all while giving you complete control over your data and security policies.
With over 470,000 installations and protection for over 1 million websites, SafeLine is proven to withstand real-world attacks and deliver reliable, low-maintenance web application security.
Try it today and join the growing community of developers securing their web applications with SafeLine!
Top comments (1)
We’ve been burned by JSON/GraphQL triggering regex FPs, so we switched to content-type-aware parsing, field allowlists, and “shadow” rollouts first. The sneakiest scrapers are low-and-slow on residential IPs and run JS, so we lean on behavior signals, cookie binding, device/TLS fingerprint consistency, and verified-bot allowlists. Numbers-wise, SafeLine matched or beat ModSecurity/NAXSI on p95 under real trace replays, keep nodes stateless, ship per‑region configs via GitOps, and watch drift. For ops hygiene, we lean on structured logs, SLOs on p95/p99 and FP budget, heavy redaction with SSO/RBAC, CI/CD rule lint + trace replays, IaC and SIEM/SOAR hooks-self-hosting pencils out as lower cost/more control, with the trade-off of fewer edge POPs and less managed intel.