Orbit on the web

An Orbit service is a native binary that speaks HTTP. This page is about what it answers, so you can call one from anything: curl, a test, or a browser.

The endpoints every service gets

You do not write these. They exist as soon as the binary starts, and they cost nothing:

Path	What it returns
/health	liveness, with the version and uptime
/ready	whether the process is accepting traffic
/metrics	request totals, mean latency in microseconds, active workers
/_ledger	per-route request counts, mean milliseconds, database share
/_ledger/data	the same, as data rather than a page

/health is the one to put in a load balancer, and it is the one in the repository’s own examples.

Calling one from a browser

Orbit is not a browser runtime, so this is a service you call, not code you bundle. A fetch from a page looks like this:

const response = await fetch("http://127.0.0.1:8080/health");
const body = await response.json();
// { status: "UP", version: "0.1.0-rc.2", uptime_seconds: 12 }

Two things follow from Orbit emitting C and not JavaScript:

• CORS is your front end’s job. Add the headers at the edge, or serve the page from the same origin.
• There is no WebAssembly build. You cannot run Orbit in a tab today. If you need to try a route without a server, the examples in the repository are the fastest path, and they are three commands.

Serving the files it produces

A compiled service is one file. There is no asset directory to copy and no runtime to install next to it, so deploying is copying a binary and giving it a port.

./orbit build examples/blog_api.orb -o blog_api
./blog_api 8080

The deploy tutorial covers Windows, Linux, and one-box clustering.

What a request does not get you

There is no latency distribution, so p99 is not something you can read off a running service today. system.latency_avg_us() is a mean, and a mean is not a tail. If you need percentiles, the honest answer is that the instrumentation for them is not built yet, and it is listed as an open item rather than improvised from a mean.