Looking for a way to secure your personal website from hackers? Check out SafeLine, a powerful open-source web application firewall (WAF) that’s already garnered 11.8K stars on GitHub. In this article, I’ll walk you through how to deploy SafeLine and have your site protected in just 3 minutes.

What makes SafeLine special?

SafeLine uses state-of-the-art semantic detection technology, working as a reverse proxy to shield your website from malicious attacks. Here are some of its standout features:

• Ease of use: It’s containerized, so installation is a breeze – you can deploy it with a single command and get started at no cost.
• Security: SafeLine pioneers an advanced semantic analysis algorithm that offers precise detection with minimal false positives and is tough to bypass.
• Performance: Powered by a rule-free detection engine and linear security algorithms, SafeLine adds only about 1 millisecond of latency per request.
• Reliability: Built on Nginx, it offers robust traffic handling with a comprehensive health check system to ensure uptime.

Step 1: Install SafeLine

Installing SafeLine is super simple. Run the following command on a Linux server that’s not your website's server:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSLk https://waf.chaitin.com/release/latest/setup.sh)"

In just 3 minutes, the installation will be complete. Once done, open your browser and navigate to https://<safeline-ip>:9443/ to access the SafeLine dashboard.

Step 2: Configure Your Site

After opening the dashboard, go to the Web Services section and add the server address of the site you want to protect. Once SafeLine is in protection mode, your website will be shielded from most common attacks.

Step 3: Stay Protected from Attacks

SafeLine actively filters and monitors your site’s traffic, protecting you from a range of attacks such as SQL injection, XSS, code injection, command injection, CRLF injection, LDAP injection, XPath injection, and bot scraping.

Any malicious actor trying to break into your site will be blocked, receiving an error message like this:

View Historical Attack Logs

You can check all intercepted attacks through the SafeLine dashboard, viewing details like the attacker’s IP address and the type of attack they attempted.

Why SafeLine?

SafeLine has been installed over 180,000 times, protecting 1 million+ websites while processing 30 billion+ HTTP requests daily.

Check it out on GitHub and give it a try!
GitHub: https://github.com/chaitin/SafeLine