Re: [ANN] mote - Lightweight HTTP server with routing and middleware

Thanks everyone for the interest and feedback.

Stefano, my goal is to keep mote minimal with well-defined features to 
avoid feature creep.

Pierre, really appreciate you trying it on a real project and taking the 
time to contribute. If you want single portable binaries, check out 
https://github.com/luanvil/luast. It has built-in support for mote and can 
cross-compile to Linux/macOS/Windows.

Daniel, good to see more activity in this space. Would you be interested in 
collaborating? Mote could serve as the HTTP server layer while Crescent 
adds higher-level features on top (ORM, views, etc.). Just a thought if 
you're open to it.

On Sunday, February 1, 2026 at 1:32:13 PM UTC+4 Pierre Chapuis wrote:

> I have migrated one of my personal applications to mote, it works really 
> well and I intend to keep using it.
>
> I have hit a problem with HTTP forms processing, I have opened a PR for 
> this: https://github.com/luanvil/mote/pull/1/changes
>
> -- 
> Pierre Chapuis
>
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2026, at 11:47, Pierre Chapuis wrote:
>
> Currently, I use https://redbean.dev/. It has the big advantage of being 
> designed to distribute as a single, portable binary.
>
> mote looks really good though, I especially like that it has SSE built-in. 
> I will probably try it sometime soon.
>
> -- 
> Pierre Chapuis
>
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2026, at 01:01, 'Stefano' via lua-l wrote:
>
> Thank you for this work. I was looking for a modern, robust, and 
> lightweight Web framework in Lua a few month ago, and the best I could find 
> was Pegasus, which gets the job done, albeit with many limitations. It 
> feels to me that such framework, ideally one that keeps in line with the 
> minimalist philosophy of Lua but provides some useful tools such as routing 
> and header, cookie, etc. handling, is one major missing component from the 
> Lua ecosystem.
>
> I also see another recent thread about "Crescent framework" but that 
> project seems to have a much broader scope, so if both projects were 
> successful, it would be really nice if they kept separate goals. 
>
> I will definitely take a serious look at this further down my development.
> s
>
> On Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 7:18:57 PM UTC-5 Rett Berg wrote:
>
> > So it doesn’t even support current Lua. What a shame.
>
> Is this a joke? If so, it was not obvious.
>
> To author: 5.5 was released all of a few weeks ago, there is no 
> expectation you would have tested it yet.
>
> On Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 11:58:12 AM UTC-7 Papuna Gagnidze wrote:
>
> Hi Marc,
>
> Thanks for the feedback. I haven't tested it on 5.5 yet, but I'll update 
> the README once I verify it.
>
> Thanks Michael, glad you find it useful.
>
> I deleted the original post to fix formatting issues, not realizing the 
> emails had already been sent. We can continue the discussion here 
> regardless.
> On Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 10:45:05 PM UTC+4 Marc Balmer wrote:
>
>
> This cought my eye:
>
> “ Works with Lua 5.1–5.4. LuaJIT recommended for performance”
>
> So it doesn’t even support current Lua. What a shame.
>
>
> Am 27.01.2026 um 19:38 schrieb Michael Lenaghan <[email protected]>:
>
> 
>
> Excellent!
>
> On Jan 27, 2026 at 9:22:10 AM, Papuna Gagnidze <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've released mote, a standalone HTTP server library for Lua/LuaJIT. It 
> started as the core of a BaaS project I was building and I decided to 
> extract it into a standalone library.
>
> It has Koa-style routing with URL params, onion middleware, and built-in 
> support for CORS, JWT, rate limiting, and Server-Sent Events with pub/sub. 
> Runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
>
> ```lua
> local mote = require("mote")
>
> mote.get("/users/:id", function(ctx)
>     ctx.response.body = { id = ctx.params.id }
> end)
>
> mote.create({ port = 8080 }):run()
> ```
>
> `luarocks install mote`
>
> https://github.com/luanvil/mote
>
> I'd love to hear what you think.
>
>
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