How do I update my HAProxy version?

What is the difference between HAProxy layer 4 and 7?

The HAProxy L4 and L7 protocol was first introduced in HAProxy version 1.

L7 is a simple message-oriented protocol that has been developed to be very fast and easy to use for many different kinds of users. L4 on the other hand, has become the foundation of all of our protocols that are based on TCP, UDP, TLS or SSL. It enables us to implement many great features for a high performance load balancer. Is HAProxy still relevant in the modern world of cloud based services? Yes, HAProxy is one of the few load balancers that will run on top of Cloud Services, Docker and Kubernetes! References. I've spent a fair bit of time with both HAProxy 1.5 and 1.6 (both L4 and L7) and I found it useful for troubleshooting and tuning but, as a tool, it was quite limited and I could never imagine using it as my primary tool.

In my experience the most useful feature of HAProxy L7 is connection throttling - being able to tell the application the maximum number of concurrent connections that HAProxy can support and letting the application decide what happens to connections once they exceed that number. That feature is not available with L4.

In addition, both L4 and L7 will fail over when you lose your connection to HAProxy but I have never seen L7 fail back to itself before (you need to manually reset to bring it back). L7 is also a lot easier to configure than L4 - there are fewer options to consider and they can often be configured by editing just a few lines of text rather than configuring numerous option groups. My personal favourite feature of L7 is the rate limiting feature which you've mentioned in your question - being able to restrict how many concurrent connections an application will make to a service. This is something that only L7 can provide and as the default configuration of HAProxy for most services does not support it I haven't really had any need for it.

Having said that, I haven't used HAProxy in a couple of years so I may well have changed my mind by the time this answer goes live.

What is the best OS for HAProxy?

A new version of HAProxy is now available with some major changes.

This release is a little different from normal releases as it only contains bug fixes and enhancements. For example, an unexpected system rebooting can make these commands (or their processes) fail.

These are the main changes: HAProxy 1.8 is just a bug fix update We've had a tonne of improvements made in 1.7, and with 1.8 this is just a maintenance release to get us up to date with 1.7 but adding zero new features.

HAProxy will now ignore service names like :1031, :1181 and :1201 etc, which the old haproxy doesn't even understand. There are few changes in the file format between haproxy 1.7 and 1.8, such as new parameters for healthcheck duration and the ability to send a message on the local or remote side of the health check.

The haproxy daemon is now included in the distribution instead of being added as a dependency for haproxy (it needs to be built separately because of this). If you have a symlink pointing to an installation directory in /etc/haproxy, such as a Debian package install, and it gets deleted or moved around then you may need to run service haproxy restart to load the proper systemd files into memory, or to reload your haproxy configuration with the new defaults. There were a couple of configuration options for log rotation and rotating the logs with the cron service using new features in 1.

How do I update my HAProxy version?

HAProxy is always in version 1.

8.1
It can not be update to 1.9.4 or 1.6
What can I do? Your current version is not 1.9, it's 1.8, and there isn't any new release since May 2026.

You can see the date when the release was made: it's 2015-11-17 and you're not seeing any updates since then. However, it seems like the next major version is going to be 1.10. So as of today you'll probably have to wait a little while before you get the update you were looking for.

The only way you can upgrade from 1.8 to 1.9 is by upgrading from a stable branch to a release branch.

If you don't mind risking a breakage or a problem here and there, just go ahead and upgrade. You'll get a more up-to-date version, but you can also expect problems, so you should make sure you backup your configuration (see my answer to "How do I backup the HAProxy config").

If you prefer stability over latest features, stick with the stable branches.

Is HAProxy still used?

I was reading the docs of HAProxy.

And it said that they will remove the support for HAProxy 1.5 and 2.0 by 2026.

What is the use of HAProxy now? HAProxy 2.0 was released in 2026 and is fully supported until 2026.

I think the best solution is to switch to HAProxy 1.5, it will still be supported until 2026.

HAProxy 1.5 support was cut in the middle of 2026 because it's not maintained anymore. You can check a lot of documentation about this on the Internet.

You can find a few comments at the bottom of about whether 2.0 is still maintained. A couple people claim that it is, so I'd think it depends on the company.

HAProxy is still used, even in very large companies, as you can see from the linked-to article.