Example Restify Proxy Setup

Thanks to https://gist.github.com/jeffwhelpley/5417758.

Preamble

I needed to figure out how to proxy certain restify endpoints back to other services. The repo http-proxy-middleware can't be used with restify per endpoint so we need to use the http-proxy code per route; being sure to disable the bodyParser middleware on those routes.

In gateway/index.js you'll see a method middlewareApplicator which is applied to the bodyParser middleware to conditionally turn it on or off. In this case, it is not applied to the /upload as this route is the one being proxied elsewhere.

Setup the containers

There are two services in this repo (gateway and backend) that can be run as docker containers. To build them do the following:

> cd gateway
> docker build -t play/gateway .
> cd ../backend
> docker build -t play/backend .

The tags are required as these are used in the compose file

Install the required packages:

> cd gateway
> yarn install
> cd ../backend
> yarn install
> cd ../frontend
> yarn install

Starting and stopping the containers

To start the containers ./start.sh. Likewise, to stop them: ./stop.sh

Logging

You probably want to have three terminals open at this point. Two of them should show the container logs for each of gateway and backend (docker logs -f ${containerid}) and the third is where you run the client from.

Testing

In the third terminal:

> cd frontend
> node .

If all goes well you shouldn't see anything in the gateway logs and the backend logs should show something like:

{ image:
   File {
     domain: null,
     _events: {},
     _eventsCount: 0,
     _maxListeners: undefined,
     size: 18154,
     path: '/tmp/upload_99253a38a3e777424beca8f508111ed5',
     name: 'photo.jpg',
     type: 'image/jpeg',
     hash: null,
     lastModifiedDate: 2018-04-09T23:26:51.865Z,
     _writeStream:
      WriteStream {
        _writableState: [Object],
        writable: false,
        domain: null,
        _events: {},
        _eventsCount: 0,
        _maxListeners: undefined,
        path: '/tmp/upload_99253a38a3e777424beca8f508111ed5',
        fd: null,
        flags: 'w',
        mode: 438,
        start: undefined,
        autoClose: true,
        pos: undefined,
        bytesWritten: 18154,
        closed: true } } }