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Vapor 5 Beta

After 6 and a half years of Vapor 4, and a decade to the day of Vapor 1.0, we're excited to show off the next version of Vapor, with the first beta release
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10 years to the day that Vapor 1.0 was tagged, and after nearly 6 and a half years and 306 releases of Vapor 4, I’m super excited to announce the first beta release of Vapor 5!

The Vapor 5 Logo

Work started on Vapor 5 over 2 years ago and we’ve been quietly working on the alphas since the first alpha release in June. Now, after 49,000 lines of code changed, with all of the architectural changes complete, we’re ready for more eyes and people to actually try out the new version.

This post is part of a series of posts for Vapor Week. See the main blog post for more information.

New Features

Vapor 5 is essentially a complete rewrite of the entire framework. The highlights include:

  • No more EventLoop or EventLoopFuture! Vapor 5 is fully async/await with real structured concurrency support. We’ve even managed to almost completely remove NIO from the public APIs, with a couple of ByteBuffers to remove from Multipart and some NIO work around compression and TLS to figure out.

  • A brand new HTTP server. Vapor 5 builds upon Swift HTTP Server, which is a new, modern HTTP server with support for bidirectional streaming, HTTP/3, and much more. Vapor can now concentrate on being a great web framework and hand off the HTTP handling to the new server.

  • Streaming by default. Vapor 5 request and response bodies are now streaming-first, making it super easy to work with large files, backpressure, with great memory efficiency. We still have lots of syntactic sugar on top, so if you’re dealing with Data or JSON, you can easily handle those. Even better, the streaming closures use Span, making it as performant as possible.

  • Service Lifecycle support. Vapor 5’s Application is just a Service, making it super easy to integrate with bigger applications. We also allow you to pass other services to your Application and let Vapor handle the lifecycle of those services as well.

  • Swift Configuration support. We now use Swift Configuration to manage configuration of Vapor, making it easier to integrate with the rest of the Swift ecosystem.

  • Swift HTTP Types. Our request and response types now expose HTTPTypes such as Status to better integrate with the ecosystem and make the HTTP server (and NIO) an implementation detail.

  • A brand new, rewritten, Vapor Testing library that unifies the API with one way to test your application.

  • Streaming support in the Client and VaporTesting.

  • All of the SwiftPM flags! We have enabled almost every flag we could, including InternalImportsByDefault, NonisolatedNonsendingByDefault and .strictMemorySafety(). Not only does this ensure we are as safe as possible, but it sets us up for the future to handle Swift versions.

  • New traits that make it easy to turn off certain features to shrink down the amount of Vapor you need to compile, use and distribute.

  • A new, experimental macro library. We’ve built a new experimental macro library to help you define your routes and controllers. This brings type-safe routing and parameters, compiler checked authentication, and simpler route definitions! This will be a separate post and is still moving quickly.

Known Issues

Vapor 5 Beta 1 has a couple of known issues, notably support for compression, which is coming soon, and support for WebSockets, which is waiting on an implementation in the HTTP server. Keep an eye on the releases page for when these land!

Swift 6.4 Required

Vapor 5 requires Swift 6.4 or later (and macOS 26 or later), which luckily was released just yesterday! This is because we take full advantage of the new Swift features, full Span support, and to ensure a lot of common errors, including things like trying to capture the request body, are compiler errors.

Vapor 4

Vapor 4 is still the current version of Vapor, but most of the effort and new feature development will now happen in Vapor 5. However, we will be announcing a support schedule closer to the release of Vapor 5, but rest assured Vapor 4 will continue to receive bug fixes and security updates long after the Vapor 5 release, with official paid extended support for those that need it coming soon.

Try It Out

The template has already been updated on the vapor5 branch with support for Fluent if desired. Leaf integration will be available soon. You can create a new project with:

vapor new MyVapor5App --branch vapor5

Note: the template currently relies on FluentKit directly, with some of the integration work done in the template. That will likely move over to vapor/fluent in the future once we update that.

You can also point your manifest to the new release if you have an existing project by pointing to the beta release:

.package(url: "https://github.com/vapor/vapor.git", from: "5.0.0-beta.1"),

We’ll be releasing the migration guide and complete documentation over the coming weeks. We also have a lot of work to do with all the integration packages to make it easy to adopt Fluent, JWT, Queues etc. Again, those will come in the near future.

Whilst the betas should be fairly stable, we don’t recommend running this in production just yet for critical services. However, we are excited to see how you find Vapor 5. As always, if you discover issues, you can raise an issue on GitHub or reach out on Discord. We don’t have a complete timeline for the Vapor 5 release as some of it depends on the ecosystem dependencies and we want to make sure we get it right. Vapor 4 has been the supported version for 6 and a half years and counting - we want a similar lifespan for Vapor 5.

As ever, we couldn’t do this without the support of the community. We’ve already had multiple contributions from the community, and you can see the list of issues on the project board if you want to get involved. And this would not have been possible without the support of our sponsors, both from Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors.

Happy building!