Cdnjs

Last updated
cdnjs
CDNJS Logo - Web, Dark Variant.png
Developer(s) Ryan Kirkman, Thomas Davis, Matt Cowley, Sven Sauleau, Tyler Caslin
Initial releaseFebruary 25, 2011;11 years ago (2011-02-25) [1]
Repository github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs
Written in JavaScript, Go
Operating system Cross-platform
Type FOSS CDN
License MIT License [2]
Website cdnjs.com

cdnjs is a free and open-source software (FOSS) content delivery network (CDN) hosted by Cloudflare. [3] [4] As of May 2021, it serves 4,013 JavaScript and CSS libraries, which are stored publicly on GitHub. [5] [6] [7] It is included in millions of websites, or 12.4% of the websites on the Internet, making it the second most popular CDN for JavaScript. [8] [9] [10]

Contents

History

In January 2011, Ryan Kirkman and Thomas Davis created the service, [11] launching it on GitHub on February 25, 2011. [12] [13] [14] It initially served content through Amazon CloudFront. [12] [15] On June 15, 2011, [16] cdnjs partnered with Cloudflare, who provided the CDN and subdomain cdnjs.cloudflare.com for the project. [12] [13] [14] [17]

On November 1, 2019, the founders turned over control of cdnjs to Cloudflare, citing "technical and commercial reasons." [18] According to the community maintainers, the project was difficult to manage because of limited access to the GitHub repository, inactive founders, and a small budget. [18] [19] [20] It is estimated the annual budget at the time was approximately $50/yr. [18] [21]

Operation

The service is maintained by the community and Cloudflare. [4] As of May 2021, there have been 1,443 contributors to the main GitHub repository, and 88 contributors to the newer package configuration GitHub repository. [6] [22]

It is also sponsored by DigitalOcean, Algolia, Heroku, Atlassian, Sentry, and Lean20. [23] [24] [25]

There is a public JSON API for developers to query cdnjs library metadata. [26] [27]

Resources on cdnjs can be loaded using a number of connection protocols – HTTP/2, HTTP, HTTPS or SPDY. [5] [25] [28]

The cdnjs.cloudflare.com domain is part of the HSTS preload list. [29]

There exist websites that host clones of cdnjs libraries on their own servers:

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References

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