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It's Vapor Week! Celebrating 10 Years of Vapor Read more
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Ten Years of Vapor

This week marks 10 years of Vapor! We're running a special Vapor Week to celebrate with exclusive merch, look backs and special announcements.
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Back in early 2016, Tanner Nelson created the very first commit of Vapor. This was only a few months after Swift was open sourced and available on Linux. Tomorrow marks 10 years to the day since Vapor 1.0 was tagged as the first major release of the framework.

Vapor’s First Commit in the Git log

Swift has changed quite a bit since then! But the goals and principles of Vapor have remained the same: to provide an expressive, easy-to-use and powerful framework for building server applications in Swift. For any open source project to still be around 10 years later is an amazing achievement and it wouldn’t have been possible without the hundreds of people who have submitted code and pull requests, and the thousands of community members who have contributed to the project, written documentation, answered questions on Slack, Discord, Stack Overflow and the forums and made Vapor what it is today. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the project over the years!

Looking back, you can see the core principles of Vapor have been consistent. The route handler definition for Vapor 1 looks remarkably similar to today. And we’ve always taken advantage of the latest Swift features with every release, something that will continue with the next version of Vapor 👀. And as one of the very first posts from Tanner shows, Vapor has always been open source and built for the community and will continue to be.

A Decade In Five Releases

Vapor 4 has been out for nearly 6 and a half years now! And it’s been an amazing journey:

  • 15th September 2016 - Vapor 1.0 released as the first stable version of the framework.

  • 17th May 2017 - Vapor 2.0 released with new storage architecture and big performance improvements.

  • 4th May 2018 - Vapor 3.0 released, rewritten from the ground up to be non-blocking and built on top of SwiftNIO. It was the introduction of futures in Vapor and support for the then-new Codable features in Swift.

  • 9th April 2020 - Vapor 4.0 released with new property wrapper support in Fluent’s Models, and the syntax that we all use today.

  • 26th October 2021 - A special mention to Vapor 4.50.0 which introduced async/await support to Vapor, finally removing the need to learn the difference between a map, flatMap, tryFlatMap and flatMapThrowing!

Vapor Week

To celebrate our 10 year anniversary, we’re running a special Vapor Week! We’ll be posting a series of blog posts this week, showcasing the users of Vapor, some history, a look at our new websites and maybe even some special announcements. Tomorrow’s post lands on the anniversary and is not one to miss.

Anniversary Merch

To start, we have some exclusive merch on the Vapor Store to celebrate the 10 year anniversary.

Vapor Anniversary Merch T-shirts on sale now

These t-shirts will only be available until 30th September, so make sure to grab one before they disappear. For this week only, we are also offering a 15% discount across the entire store with the code VAPORWEEK, valid until Sunday 20th September.

Ten More Years

Vapor is completely open source and funded thanks to the companies and individuals who sponsor it. So if you’ve sponsored a one-time donation, bought a t-shirt, spoken about Vapor on a podcast or conference, written a blog post, or sponsored through Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors, for a month or those that have been sponsoring for years, thank you! Your support is what keeps the project going.

If Vapor is useful to you or your company, there are a few ways to keep it going: sponsor the project, pick up a good first issue, improve the docs, or answer a question in Discord. All of it counts.