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Documentation and Community

The upstream manual set, source locations, support channels, contacts, and licensing

1. Available documentation

The complete HAProxy documentation is contained in the following documents. Please ensure to consult the relevant documentation to save time and to get the most accurate response to your needs. Also please refrain from sending questions to the mailing list whose responses are present in these documents.

  • intro.txt (this document): it presents the basics of load balancing, HAProxy as a product, what it does, what it doesn’t do, some known traps to avoid, some OS-specific limitations, how to get it, how it evolves, how to ensure you’re running with all known fixes, how to update it, complements and alternatives.

  • management.txt: it explains how to start haproxy, how to manage it at runtime, how to manage it on multiple nodes, and how to proceed with seamless upgrades.

  • configuration.txt: the reference manual details all configuration keywords and their options. It is used when a configuration change is needed.

  • coding-style.txt: this is for developers who want to propose some code to the project. It explains the style to adopt for the code. It is not very strict and not all the code base completely respects it, but contributions which diverge too much from it will be rejected.

  • proxy-protocol.txt: this is the de-facto specification of the PROXY protocol which is implemented by HAProxy and a number of third party products.

  • security.txt: how to report a security issue, and what does and does not qualify as a vulnerability.

  • README: how to build HAProxy from sources

5. Contacts

If you want to contact the developers or any community member about anything, the best way to do it usually is via the mailing list by sending your message to [email protected]. Please note that this list is public and its archives are public as well so you should avoid disclosing sensitive information. A thousand of users of various experience levels are present there and even the most complex questions usually find an optimal response relatively quickly. Suggestions are welcome too. For users having difficulties with e-mail, a Discourse platform is available at http://discourse.haproxy.org/ . However please keep in mind that there are less people reading questions there and that most are handled by a really tiny team. In any case, please be patient and respectful with those who devote their spare time helping others.

I you believe you’ve found a bug but are not sure, it’s best reported on the mailing list. If you’re quite convinced you’ve found a bug, that your version is up-to-date in its branch, and you already have a GitHub account, feel free to go directly to https://github.com/haproxy/haproxy/ and file an issue with all possibly available details. Again, this is public so be careful not to post information you might later regret. Since the issue tracker presents itself as a very long thread, please avoid pasting very long dumps (a few hundreds lines or more) and attach them instead.

If you believe you may have found a security issue, please refer to the file doc/security.txt. It explains what does and does not qualify as a vulnerability in HAProxy, and how to report a genuine one privately. Most suspected issues turn out to be ordinary bugs that are better reported as described above.

Complete local manual set

Edition provenance

Last modified August 22, 2026 · fix(ci): normalize Hugo route casing (c0d089b)
Adapted from HAProxy 3.4 Starter Guide (v3.4.3, chapters 1 and 5), Copyright 2000-2026 Willy Tarreau, under GNU General Public License v2.0. See attribution and change history.