Proxie

Proxie is a pluggable and configurable HTTP proxy/server.

What does this mean?

It means that you can configure proxie on a per site basis and each site will define which strategy should be employed.

e.g. if you want the entire site for www.chilts.org to redirect to chilts.org, all you need to do is drop a a proxie config file into /etc/proxie.d/www-chilts-org.ini. It will look like this:

[www.chilts.org]
type=redirect
to=chilts.org

That's all you need to do for proxie to redirect every request on that site to the naked domain.

Installation

$ npm install -g proxie

Then you can just run:

$ proxie

If you need to bind to port 80, then either run it as root (not receommended) or use authbind to let you bind to port 80 as an unprivileged user.

$ sudo apt-get install authbind
$ sudo touch /etc/authbind/byport/80
$ sudo chown $USER /etc/authbind/byport/80
$ sudo chmod 500 /etc/authbind/byport/80
$ proxie

Built in Strategies

You can build your own strategies for proxie, but the following is the set that comes with proxie.

proxy

This strategy will proxy every request through to another server. For example if you are running a site called cssminifier.com on port 3000 on the same host, you would use the following strategy:

[cssminifier.com]
type=proxy
host=localhost
port=3000

round-robin

This strategy will proxy every request through to another server which it will pick (round-robin) from the list provided. For example if you are running a site called javascript-minifier.com on port 3001 on the three different hosts, you would use the following strategy:

[javascript-minifier.com]
type=round-robin
hosts=bohr:3001,einstein:3001,tesla:3001

This assume bohr, einstein and tesla resolve correctly on this host. You may use IP addresses if you want to.

[javascript-minifier.com]
type=round-robin
hosts=10.0.0.5:3001,10.0.0.6:3001,10.0.0.7:3001

Or just have multiple servers on localhost. Whatever works for you.

[javascript-minifier.com]
type=round-robin
hosts=localhost:8888,localhost:8889

redirect

A redirect site will look like, and so every request to http://www.chilts.org/$1 will be 301 redirected to http://chilts.org/$1:

[www.chilts.org]
type=redirect
to=chilts.org

static

Proxie can also serve static sites out of the box. To do this use the following config:

[awssum.io]
type=static
dir=/path/to/awssum-io/htdocs

not-found

This seems like a strange thing to for a domain but it comes in useful for proxie if it receives a request for a site that is unknown. It was made into a strategy so that it could be re-used. All it does is return a 404 - Not found for every request to that domain.

[old.example.com]
type=not-found

Your own Stragey

Or you can write your own strategy (I'd love a PR if it's a generic strategy). If it's something that could be useful to everyone, let me know. :)

Config File

Proxie reads the config file /etc/proxie.ini to get some settings. Currently the only setting read is port. An example config file is:

port=80

/etc/proxie.d/

So that Proxie knows which sites to proxy, you should put files into the /etc/proxie.d/ directory. An example config file for a simple site might be:

e.g. /etc/proxie.d/chilts-org:

[www.chilts.org]
type=redirect
to=chilts.org

[chilts.org]
type=proxy
host=localhost
port=3000

As you can see, all requests on the www.chilts.org subdomain will be redirected to the naked domain.

All requests on the naked domain will be proxied through to localhost:3000.

It is up to your blog site to install a relevant file into /etc/proxie.d/ so that proxie knows where to proxy the site.

An example config you might use when locally developing a site could be:

[chilts.localhost]
type=proxy
host=localhost
port=3000

Author

Written by Andrew Chilton - Blog - Twitter.

License

• Copyright 2013 Andrew Chilton. All rights reserved.

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