Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust

Posted by max_lt 1/1/2026

Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust(openworkers.com)

I've been working on this for some time now, starting with vm2, then deno-core for 2 years, and recently rewrote it on rusty_v8 with Claude's help.

OpenWorkers lets you run untrusted JS in V8 isolates on your own infrastructure. Same DX as Cloudflare Workers, no vendor lock-in.

What works today: fetch, KV, Postgres bindings, S3/R2, cron scheduling, crypto.subtle.

Self-hosting is a single docker-compose file + Postgres.

Would love feedback on the architecture and what feature you'd want next.

500 points | 158 commentspage 3

mohsen1 1/1/2026|

This is super nice! Thank you for working on this!

Recently really enjoying CloudFlare Workflows (used it in https://mafia-arena.com) and would be nice to build Workflows on top of this too.

max_lt 1/1/2026|

Thanks! Workflows is definitely interesting – it's basically durable execution with steps and retries. It's on the radar, probably after the CLI and GitHub integration.

dangoodmanUT 1/1/2026||

This is similar to what rivet (1) does, perhaps focusing more on stateless than rivet does

(1) https://www.rivet.dev/docs/actors/

buremba 1/1/2026||

I wonder why V8 is considered as superior compared to WASM for sandboxing.

m11a 1/1/2026||

Is WASM’s story for side effects solved yet? eg network calls seems too complicated (https://github.com/vasilev/HTTP-request-from-inside-WASM etc)

skybrian 1/1/2026||

On V8, you can run both JavaScript and WASM.

buremba 1/1/2026||

Theoretically yes, but CF workers or this project doesn't support it. Indeed none of the cloud providers support WASM as first-party support yet.

justincormack 1/1/2026|||

Workers does support wasm https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/webas...

buremba 1/1/2026||

Maybe it's better now but I wouldn't call this first-class support, as you rely on the JS runtime to initialize WASM.

The last time I tried it, the cold start was over 10 seconds, making it unusable for any practical use case. Maybe the tech is not there but given that WASM guarantees the sandboxing already and supports multiple languages, I was hoping we would have providers investing in it.

max_lt 1/1/2026||||

CF Workers does support WASM. We do too as V8 handles it natively. Tested it, works, just hasn't been polished yet.

otterley 1/1/2026|||

The problem is that there’s not much of a market opportunity yet. Customers aren’t voting for WASM with their wallets like they are mainstream language runtimes.

rcarmo 1/2/2026||

Nice. An obvious link to the compose file would be great (I assume you have prebuilt images on ghcr.io?), and if it happens to work on ARM, I will certainly give it a try.

max_lt 1/3/2026|

Docker compose is here: https://github.com/openworkers/openworkers-infra

Images are on ghcr.io. I code on ARM myself and the runner build image is multi-platform, so it should work. Haven't tested in a while though, let me know how it goes!

rcarmo 1/3/2026||

Sure thing. Got sidetracked this weekend with pre-work cleaning, will get back to it soon, hopefully.

st3fan 1/1/2026||

This is very nice! Do you plan to hook this up to GitHub, so that a push of worker code (and maybe a yaml describing the environment & resources) will result in a redeploy?

max_lt 1/1/2026|

Not yet, but it's one of the next big features. I'm currently working on the CLI (WIP), and GitHub integration with auto-deploy on push will come after that. A yaml config for bindings/cron is definitely on the roadmap too.

max_lt 1/1/2026||

I'm also working on execution recording/replay – the idea is to capture a deterministic trace of a request, so you can push it as a GitHub issue and replay it locally (or let an AI debug it).

TZubiri 1/1/2026||

https://imgflip.com/i/agah04

TZubiri 1/1/2026|

https://imgflip.com/i/agah2y

theknarf 1/1/2026||

Why would I want this over just sticking Node / Deno / Bun in a Docker container?

m11a 1/1/2026|

Node in Docker doesn’t have full isolation and ‘sandbox’ escapes are possible. V8 is comparatively quite hardened

kachapopopow 1/1/2026||

Could you add a kubernetes deployment quick-start? Just a simple deployment.yaml is enough.

max_lt 1/3/2026|

Yes, I see this is a popular request. Will add it soon. For now, compose files are in the infra repo: https://github.com/openworkers/openworkers-infra

Fun fact: I tried K8s early on but found it overkill for my setup, so I stayed on Compose. Will revisit it properly now.

kachapopopow 1/3/2026||

k3s is a good non overkill alternative while benefiting from everything k8s offers.

yencabulator 1/4/2026||

I don't see a single license mentioned anywhere?

kristianpaul 1/1/2026|

Interesting option to consider next to openfaas

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