Local Proxy Hub

Problem

You might have your own vps and may be lots of apps you want to deploy inside of it and test the functionality. The only problem is configuring nginx to serve all your app in different route for your domain. For example, you want to do the following-

• yourdomain/api => Is for your portfolio api, which is running at localhost:9090 of that machine.
• yourdomain/blog => Is for your blog, running at localhost:8080 of the same machine.
• yourdomain/fbapp => Some cool facebook app of yours, running at localhost:5000.

You might want to do it using proxy-pass in nginx, but if you have not done this in real, let me tell you how painful it is and how complicated it gets when you have to also configure path rewrite for your route- since you don't want to see this: yourdomain/blog/a to get translated into localhost:8080/blog/a, cause come on that url does not exist! So, long story short, the nginx configuration is complicated and might take you loads of nights to actually make it work, finally!

Solution

If you know reverse proxy, you already know what this tool is going to do. In case you did not understand it yet, check below to see what it does-

So, one single proxy-pass for location / in nginx config is all you need to place. And the proxy-pass should be proxying all requests to - http://localhost:8585; where this hub will be running.

Installation

• npm install -g pm2(pm2 needs to be installed globally)
• npm install -g local-proxy-hub

The server will automatically be running after the installation on 8585 port.

Usage

To register any of your service/app running in the same machine with this hub is pretty simple via the cli that comes along- lph a <routeUrl> <proxyUrl>

Example- lph a /admin http://localhost:9093

Check all the available commands by typing- lph -h

Once a route is added/updated, the server gets restarted automatically and you don't have to worry about a thing.