crank4j

A java port of Cranker.

Crank4j consists of 2 executables that together act as a reverse proxy. What it allows is for cases where there is a firewall between your inside network and a DMZ zone.

For a normal reverse proxy, a port would need to be open allowing traffic from the DMZ to the internal network. Crank4j allows you to reverse this: Just open a port from the internal network to the DMZ, and Crank4j will tunnel HTTP traffic over the opened network.

So there are two pieces:

• The router that faces the internet, and accepts client HTTP requests
• The connector that opens connections to the router, and then passes tunneled requests to target servers.

The connections look like this:

Browser      |   DMZ        |    Internal Network
 GET   --------> router <-------- connector ---> HTTP Service
             |              |

But from the point of view of the browser, and your HTTP service, it just looks like a normal reverse proxy.

Running locally

Running from an IDE

1. Open com.danielflower.crank4j.e2etests.ManualTest and run the main method.
2. Open https://localhost:9443 in your browser.

Running against the built uber-jars

1. First, build the package: mvn package

2. Start some web service at any location, e.g. http://localhost:3000 and set this in local/connector.properties under the value target.uri

3. Start the router:

    cd local
    start-router.bat or ./start-router.sh
   

4. In another shell, start the connector:

    cd local
    start-connector.bat or ./start-router.sh
   

5. Open https://localhost:8443 in your browser.