gRPC Proxy

gRPC Go Proxy server

Project Goal

Makes it easy to build a reverse proxy for gRPC targets. This allows users to route gRPC requests based on method names and metadata without any knowledge of message contents.

The project was forked from the proof of concept work in github.com/mwitkow/grpc-proxy, and further refined with a real router project running in a production environment with multiple routing topologies.

Proxy Package

The package proxy contains a generic gRPC reverse proxy handler that allows a gRPC server.

A StreamDirector implementation is responsible for deciding where (if at all) to send a request (see example_test.go). This contrived example demonstrates how a user could use the path and associated request metadata to route a request:

func (d *ExampleDirector) Connect(ctx context.Context, method string) (context.Context, *grpc.ClientConn, error) {
  // Disable forwarding for all services prefixed with com.example.internal.
  if strings.HasPrefix(method, "/com.example.internal.") {
    return nil, nil, status.Errorf(codes.Unimplemented, "Unknown method")
  }
  md, ok := metadata.FromIncomingContext(ctx)
  if ok {
    // Decide on which backend to dial
    if val, exists := md[":authority"]; exists && val[0] == "staging.api.example.com" {
      // Make sure we use DialContext so the dialing can be cancelled/time out together with the context.
      conn, err := grpc.DialContext(ctx, "api-service.staging.svc.local", grpc.WithCodec(proxy.Codec()))
      return ctx, conn, err
    } else if val, exists := md[":authority"]; exists && val[0] == "api.example.com" {
      conn, err := grpc.DialContext(ctx, "api-service.prod.svc.local", grpc.WithCodec(proxy.Codec()))
      return ctx, conn, err
    }
  }
  return nil, nil, status.Errorf(codes.Unimplemented, "Unknown method")
}

The direct is registered with a grpc.Server, along with a special codec which allows the proxy to handle raw byte frames and pass them along without any serialization. The server may have other handlers that will be served locally, and the codec will fall back to the protobuf codec when necessary:

server := grpc.NewServer(
    grpc.CustomCodec(proxy.Codec()),
    grpc.UnknownServiceHandler(proxy.TransparentHandler(director)))
pb_test.RegisterTestServiceServer(server, &testImpl{})

License

grpc-proxy is released under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE.txt.