Nginx Route Manager

Overview

The nginx route manager provides a simple way to create dynamic routing using a docker container. A nginx server is managed by an exposed enpoint where http puts and gets are used to create new location blocks that are used to dynamically route to different locations. This is useful for services that are dyanically spun up.

This container image is available here. Code to create this container is located on github.

If you are interested in learning about the use case for dynamic routing, an article about is available on our development blog.

How to run this container

This container can be started using the following command:

docker run -p 8000:8000 -p 8080:80 spherexdev/nginx-route-manager:0.1 &

Port 8000 provides the following endpoints:

• [POST] /start_nginx
• [POST] /stop_nginx
• [POST] /update_routes
• [GET] /get_routes
• [GET] /nginx_running

How this works

A nginx configuation file is dynamically generated and the nginx server is restarted to make the new change active. Currently, only a single server block is supported for simplicity and authentication had not been implemented yet (this maybe be done in the future, thus it is recommended that the handling endpoints are only exposed to trusted hosts only).

The following is a configuration that can be posted to the "/update_routes" endpoint:

config = {
    "server": [
        ["listen", "80"],
        ["server_name", "_"],
    ],
    "routes": {
        "/r/server1": [
            ["proxy_pass", "http://localhost:8000/"],
        ],
        "/r/server2": [
            ["proxy_pass", "http://localhost:8001/"],
        ],
        "/r/server3": [
            ["proxy_pass", "http://localhost:8003/"],
            ["rewrite", "^/.well-known/host-meta.json /public.php?service=host-meta-json last"]
        ]
}

The created nginx configuration would be the following:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name _;

  location /r/server1 {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8000/;
    }
  location /r/server2 {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8001/;
    }
  location /r/server3 {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8003/;
        rewrite ^/.well-known/host-meta.json /public.php?service=host-meta-json last;
    }
}