cdnjs is a

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

(FOSS)

content delivery network A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially re ...

(CDN) hosted by

Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2009. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. Its headquarters are in San ...

. As of May 2021, it serves 4,013

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

and

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

libraries, which are stored publicly on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

. It is included in millions of websites, or 12.4% of the websites on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

, making it the second most popular CDN for JavaScript.

History

In January 2011, Ryan Kirkman and Thomas Davis created the service, launching it on GitHub on February 25, 2011. It initially served content through

Amazon CloudFront Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) operated by Amazon Web Services. Content delivery networks provide a globally-distributed network of proxy servers that cache content, such as web videos or other bulky media, more locally t ...

. On June 15, 2011, cdnjs partnered with Cloudflare, who provided the CDN and

subdomain In the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is a part of another (main) domain. For example, if a domain offered an online store as part of their website example.com, it might use the subdomain shop.example.com . Ov ...

cdnjs.cloudflare.com for the project. On November 1, 2019, the founders turned over control of cdnjs to Cloudflare, citing "technical and commercial reasons." 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. It is estimated the annual budget at the time was approximately $50/yr.

Operation

The service is maintained by the community and Cloudflare. 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. It is also sponsored by

DigitalOcean DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. () is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, USA, with 15 globally distributed data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides ...

Algolia Algolia is a proprietary search engine offering, usable through the software as a service (SaaS) model. Company Algolia was founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, both originally from Paris, France. It was originally a comp ...

Heroku Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. One of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now supports Java, ...

Atlassian Atlassian Corporation () is an Australian software company that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. The company is domiciled in Delaware, with global headquarters in Sydney, Australi ...

, Sentry, and Lean20. There is a public

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

for developers to query cdnjs library metadata. Resources on cdnjs can be loaded using a number of connection protocols –

HTTP/2 HTTP/2 (originally named HTTP/2.0) is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. It was derived from the earlier experimental SPDY protocol, originally developed by Google. HTTP/2 was developed by the HTTP Working ...

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is used for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is enc ...

SPDY SPDY (pronounced "speedy") is an obsolete open-specification communication protocol developed for transporting web content. SPDY became the basis for HTTP/2 specification. However, HTTP/2 diverged from SPDY and eventually HTTP/2 subsumed all us ...

. The cdnjs.cloudflare.com domain is part of the HSTS preload list. There exist websites that host clones of cdnjs libraries on their own servers:
Wikimedia Tool Labs

cdnjs.net

References

External links

* {{official website, https://cdnjs.com/
Github Organization
Content delivery networks