Disclaimer: This article is co-authored with GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8.

zeroserve is a small, fast, zero-config HTTPS server. You hand it a tarball of a website and it serves it - over HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, with hot reload and a tiny resident footprint. The twist is that you can drop eBPF programs into the tarball and they run on every request, in userspace, as sandboxed middleware - rewriting, authenticating, and rate-limiting requests, or reverse-proxying them to a backend when you want it to act as a gateway in front of your app.

In short:

Fast : on one core it beats nginx across most workloads - small and large static files, scripted middleware, and small-response proxying, all over HTTPS.

Efficient eBPF scripting : scripts are JIT-compiled to native code and sandboxed in userspace, cheap enough to run on every request.

Program-as-configuration : your eBPF program is the whole configuration, deciding what happens to each request.

io_uring throughout : every network and disk operation is submitted…