muxify

Dynamic Multiplexer

What is it?

A Dynamic Multiplexer
     |         |
     |         A gateway to running instances of your server applications
     No need to reloads or restarts. Changes will be applied on the next request

The need

In environments where you might have many Server-Side Rendered (SSR) application instances running on the same machine, and each might listen to a different, and even a random port, popular gateways like nginx will not help much, because they cannot get configured during their runtime and they should be restarted after each change in their configuration.

One solution is to have a gateway which distributes requests it receives to application instances that are attached to it, based on a base URL they are interested in. It launches two servers, one is the gateway itself, which routes the requests to application instances. Other one, is the operation server, which application instances can issue requests to it, for attach/detach operations.

Personally, I want to have the following architecture:

[Credit: https://app.diagrams.net/]

So, if you have the same problem, muxify might help you! 😃

Personally, I use it in development CI/CD environments for multiple instances of server applications.

It's not fast, and should not be used in production.

Usage

npx:

sudo npm install --global muxify

It will install the muxify. Then, you can start it by executing muxify command. It will start operation server at http://127.0.0.3001 and gateway server at http://127.0.0.3000.

You can change each server host and port by providing options to muxify.

Options

Executing muxify with --help, will print:

  Dynamic Multiplexer

  Usage:
    muxify [options]

  Options:
    --operation-port          Preferred operation server port.  [default: 3001]
    --operation-host          Preferred operation server host.  [default: '127.0.0.1']
    --gateway-port            Preferred gateway server port.    [default: 3000]
    --gateway-host            Preferred gateway server host.    [default: '127.0.0.1']
    --help, -h                Prints this help message and exists.
    --version, -v             Prints muxify version (1.0.0-2) and exists.

Operation Server Endpoints

Operation server have two endpoints:

• PUT /attach:

  Used to request for attaching a server to a base URL.

  Example:

  curl \
      --request PUT \
      --url http://localhost:3001/add-me \
      --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
      --data '{
          "host": "127.0.0.1",
          "port": 8090,
          "listeningUrl": "/send-me"
      }'

• PUT /detach:

  Used to request for detaching a server from a base URL.

  Example:

  curl \
      --request PUT \
      --url http://localhost:3001/add-me \
      --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
      --data '{
          "listeningUrl": "/im-listening"
      }'