Redirector

TL;DR Rack app to redirect traffic. Rails admin app for CRUD actions on redirects.

Overview

This application performs HTTP redirects. It includes additional services to create and modify redirects.

Redirector: Rack based application to redirect traffic based on request URL
Admin: Rails based application to perform CRUD on redirect records
Postgresql: DB used by Rails application to store redirect records
Prometheus: Metrics collection server
Postgresql-exporter: Prometheus data exporter for Postgresql DB
Grafana: Graphical dashboard to display Prometheus metrics

Use the admin site to add and remove regex based searches of URLs and their redirect targets. Use Grafana to create custom metics dashboard to display status. Use the redirector to redirect URLs fetched from the admin site.

URLS

Redirector at http://localhost:8080
Admin panel at http://localhost:3000
Metrics dashboard at http://localhost:4000
Raw metrics at http://localhost:9090

Background

The goal of this project is to create a spike application to try out the idea of a HTTP redirecting services that gets its URLs to rediect from another service. Scaling these services will eventually happen, so initially they are created as two different services instead of a single monolith. The CRUD based admin application made from Rails. And a Rake based application just for redirects. And as a spike project getting metrics from it's use will help determin how and what changes will be needed for a production version.

Developer Setup

Setup is a two part process. The first is to setup the servers for admin, redirecting, and monitoring. This is automated via Docker Compose. Then the second part, a manual process, is modifying your local environment to allow using internet domain names to point to the development servers.

Setup servers

bin/setup
docker-compose up -d

Setup domain names

For local testing you will need to configure some internet domain names to point to your local server. Modify your /etc/hosts (Mac/Linux) or c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts (Windows) file as a super user (root). Add entries for each domain using the following format: 127.0.0.1, then a tab or space, then domain name.

Example hosts file:

127.0.0.1   my.example.com
127.0.0.1   other.domain.gov

Many tutorials exist online for more information

TODOs