Anubis: The Lightweight Web AI Firewall for the Small Internet

The social contract of the web has changed. AI companies are vacuuming up every byte of data they can find, often ignoring robots.txt and flooding smaller servers with thousands of requests. This doesn't just steal content—it eats up bandwidth and crashes small community sites.

Anubis is a "nuclear response" for the small internet. It's a lightweight Web AI Firewall utility that sits in front of your upstream resources. Like its namesake from Egyptian mythology, it weighs the "soul" of every incoming connection using one or more technical challenges. If the connection fails the test, it doesn't get in.

Why Choose Anubis?

• Anti-AI Focus – Specifically designed to combat the "endless storm" of AI scrapers that traditional security measures often miss.
• Extreme Portability – Built to be as lightweight as possible, ensuring you don't need a massive server just to protect a small website.
• Privacy & Sovereignty – Anubis is for those who can't or won't use centralized services like Cloudflare. You stay in control of your own security layer.
• Configurable Bot Policies – You define the rules. Explicitly allowlist "good bots" like the Internet Archive while keeping the aggressive scrapers at bay.
• Open Source Transparency – Every line of the firewall is auditable. You know exactly how your traffic is being filtered and why.

Spotlight on Key Features

The Challenge Engine

Anubis doesn't just look at headers; it activey tests the client. By default, it requires JavaScript to verify that a browser is actually being used by a human. While this is a strict approach, it is a direct response to how AI companies have shifted the landscape of automated requests.

Lightweight Architecture

Designed for the "small internet," Anubis is optimized for low resource consumption. It serves as a gatekeeper that consumes minimal CPU and RAM, making it viable for hobbyist projects and community-led instances that don't have enterprise-level budgets.

Custom Policy Definitions

While Anubis is aggressive by default, it isn't a "one size fits all" brick. Developers can configure policy definitions to balance discoverability and security. This allows you to protect your content from being used to train LLMs while still appearing in the search results you actually want.

Getting Started

Anubis is designed to be integrated into your existing web stack as a protective layer.

Installation via Docker

The most common way to deploy Anubis is through Docker, which keeps the environment isolated and manageable.

# Pull the latest image
docker pull ghcr.io/techarohq/anubis:latest

# Run the container (example configuration)
docker run -p 8080:8080 \
  -e UPSTREAM_URL=http://your-website:80 \
  ghcr.io/techarohq/anubis:latest

Configuration

You will need to point Anubis to your upstream resource. Once running, all traffic should go through Anubis first. It will handle the challenge/response cycle and only proxy successful connections to your actual website.

Comparison with Proprietary Alternatives

While many users default to enterprise giants for bot protection, Anubis fills a specific niche for those who want to avoid vendor lock-in or centralized points of failure.

Guard Your Resources

You don't have to let AI scrapers dictate your server's uptime. Anubis provides a powerful, lightweight way to draw a line in the sand and protect your community's data.

• Visit the Documentation
• Download from GitHub