Early binding for proxy port

[dblock]

I am not sure whether this is a feature request or I'm doing something wrong :)

Trying to put a thin server behind a proxy (code almost identical to one in this post or this repo).

What I am seeing is that the proxy binds to the external port only once it was able to open a connection to the server it's proxying to, which for my purposes is too late. What I am trying to do is to start accepting requests and fail those until the backend comes up. Can this be accomplished?

[igrigorik]

The thin example post is proxying to a local Unix socket.. so the connection time is zero-to-none.

Not sure how well this will work, but give it a try: wrap conn.server call into EM.next_tick {}. In theory, this should allow you to setup the callbacks and accept the connection, but defer the actual connection until next server tick..

If that doesn't work, then it's certainly doable.. but may require modifications to the current proxy code.

[dblock]

That worked. There was an additional difficulty needing to only next_tick until the server is up, otherwise I was ending up with an unresponsive system. I don't completely understand why.

I posted a gist in https://gist.github.com/4259205 - I'd really appreciate any comments/suggestions/improvements, maybe there's a cleaner way to achieve this?

I'll close this issue, thanks.

[igrigorik]

Cool. re, gist: looks good.

[dblock]

Fyi, if anyone hits this page - I've used this in https://github.com/dblock/heroku-forward - it's a packaged implementation for beating the Heroku 60s boot timeout.