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ReverseProxyPlug

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A reverse proxy plug for proxying a request to another URL using a choice of Elixir HTTP client libraries. Perfect when you need to transparently proxy requests to another service but also need to have full programmatic control over the outgoing requests.

This project grew out of a fork of elixir-reverse-proxy. Advantages over the original include more flexible upstreams, zero-delay chunked transfer encoding support, HTTP2 support with Cowboy 2, several options for HTTP client libraries and focus on being a composable Plug instead of providing a standalone reverse proxy application.

Installation

Add reverse_proxy_plug to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:reverse_proxy_plug, "~> 3.0"}
  ]
end

Then add an HTTP client library, one of:

and configure depending on your choice, e.g.:

config :reverse_proxy_plug, :http_client, ReverseProxyPlug.HTTPClient.Adapters.HTTPoison

You can also set the config as a per-plug basis, which will override any global config.

plug ReverseProxyPlug, client: ReverseProxyPlug.HTTPClient.Adapters.Tesla

Either of those must be set, otherwise the system will attempt to default to the HTTPoison adapter or raise if it's not present.

Usage

The plug works best when used with Plug.Router.forward/2. Drop this line into your Plug router:

forward("/foo", to: ReverseProxyPlug, upstream: "//example.com/bar")

Now all requests matching /foo will be proxied to the upstream. For example, a request to /foo/baz made over HTTP will result in a request to http://example.com/bar/baz.

You can also specify the scheme or choose a port:

forward("/foo", to: ReverseProxyPlug, upstream: "https://example.com:4200/bar")

The :upstream option should be a well formed URI parseable by URI.parse/1, or a function with zero or one arity which returns one. If it is a function, it will be evaluated for every request. If the function is arity one, the Conn struct will be passed to it, in order to have more flexibility in dynamic routing.

Modifying the client request body

You can modify various aspects of the client request by simply modifying the Conn struct. In case you want to modify the request body, fetch it using Conn.read_body/2, make your changes, and leave it under Conn.assigns[:raw_body]. ReverseProxyPlug will use that as the request body. In case a custom raw body is not present, ReverseProxyPlug will fetch it from the Conn struct directly.

Configuration options

Custom HTTP methods

Only standard HTTP methods in "GET", "HEAD", "POST", "PUT", "DELETE", "CONNECT", "OPTIONS", "TRACE" and "PATCH" will be forwarded by default. You can specific define other custom HTTP methods in keyword :custom_http_methods.

forward("/foo", to: ReverseProxyPlug, upstream: "//example.com/bar", custom_http_methods: [:XMETHOD])

Preserve host header

A reverse HTTP proxy often has to preserve the original Host request header when making a request to the upstream origin. Presenting a different Host to the upstream server can lead to issues related to cookies, redirects, and incorrect routing that can become a security concern.

Some HTTP proxies send the original Host value in other headers, like Forwarded or X-Forwarded-Host, but those are only useful if the upstream application is coded to read those headers.

By default, ReverseProxyPlug does not preserve the original header nor does it send the original header in any other form. Use :preserve_host_header to make upstream requests with the same Host header as in the original request.

forward("/foo", to: ReverseProxyPlug, upstream: "//example.com", preserve_host_header: true)

Normalize headers for upstream request

An upstream request will downcase all request header names by default (ReverseProxyPlug.downcase_headers/1)

You can override this behaviour by passing your own normalize_headers/1, which can transform a list of headers - a list of {"header", "value"} tuples - and return them in the form desired. For instance, you may want to drop certain headers in the upstream request, beyond the usual hop-by-hop headers.

Response mode

ReverseProxyPlug supports two response modes:

  • :stream (default) - The response from the plug will always be chunk encoded. If the upstream server sends a chunked response, ReverseProxyPlug will pass chunks to the clients as soon as they arrive, resulting in zero delay. Not all adapters support the :stream response mode currently.

  • :buffer - The plug will wait until the whole response is received from the upstream server, at which point it will send it to the client using Conn.send_resp. This allows for processing the response before sending it back using Conn.register_before_send.

You can choose the response mode by passing a :response_mode option:

forward("/foo", to: ReverseProxyPlug, response_mode: :buffer, upstream: "//example.com/bar")

Response header processing mode

You can specify the behaviour of how headers from the upstream response are incorporated into the response that is sent from reverse_proxy_plug:

  • :replace - use Conn.put_resp_header to overwrite any existing headers present
  • :prepend - use Conn.prepend_resp_header to prepend headers from the upstream to existing response headers in conn.

The defaults differ per response mode - :stream_headers_mode defaults to :replace, :buffer_headers_mode to :prepend.

Client options

You can pass options to the configured HTTP client. Valid options depend on the HTTP client used.

forward("/foo", to: ReverseProxyPlug, upstream: "//example.com", client_options: [timeout: 2000])

Callback for connection errors

By default, ReverseProxyPlug will automatically respond with 502 Bad Gateway in case of network error. To inspect the HTTPoison error that caused the response, you can pass an :error_callback option.

plug(ReverseProxyPlug,
  upstream: "example.com",
  error_callback: fn error -> Logger.error("Network error: #{inspect(error)}") end
)

If you wish to handle the response directly, you can provide a function with arity 2 where the connection will be passed as the second argument:

plug(ReverseProxyPlug,
  upstream: "example.com",
  error_callback: fn error, conn ->
    Logger.error("Network error: #{inspect(error)}")
    Plug.Conn.send_resp(conn, :internal_server_error, "something went wrong")
  end)
)

You can also provide a MFA (module, function, arguments) tuple, to which the error will be inserted as the last argument:

plug(ReverseProxyPlug,
  upstream: "example.com",
  error_callback: {MyErrorHandler, :handle_proxy_error, ["example.com"]}
)

If the function specified by the MFA tuple supports two additional arguments, the error and connection will inserted as the last two arguments, respectively.

Callbacks for responses in streaming mode

In order to add special handling for responses with particular statuses instead of passing them on to the client as usual, provide the :status_callbacks option with a map from status code to handler:

plug(ReverseProxyPlug,
  upstream: "example.com",
  status_callbacks: %{404 => &handle_404/2}
)

The handler is called as soon as an HTTPoison.AsyncStatus message with the given status is received, taking the Plug.Conn and the options given to ReverseProxyPlug. It must then consume all the remaining incoming HTTPoison asynchronous response parts, respond to the client and return the Plug.Conn.

:status_callbacks must only be given when :response_mode is :stream, which is the default.

Usage in Phoenix

The Phoenix default autogenerated project assumes that you'll want to parse all request bodies coming to your Phoenix server and puts Plug.Parsers directly in your endpoint.ex. If you're using something like ReverseProxyPlug, this is likely not what you want — in this case you'll want to move Plug.Parsers out of your endpoint and into specific router pipelines or routes themselves.

Or you can extract the raw request body with a custom body reader in your endpoint.ex:

plug Plug.Parsers,
  body_reader: {CacheBodyReader, :read_body, []},
  # ...

and store it in the Conn struct with custom plug cache_body_reader.ex:

defmodule CacheBodyReader do
  @moduledoc """
  Inspired by https://hexdocs.pm/plug/1.6.0/Plug.Parsers.html#module-custom-body-reader
  """

  alias Plug.Conn

  @doc """
  Read the raw body and store it for later use in the connection.
  It ignores the updated connection returned by `Plug.Conn.read_body/2` to not break CSRF.
  """
  @spec read_body(Conn.t(), Plug.opts()) :: {:ok, String.t(), Conn.t()}
  def read_body(%Conn{request_path: "/api/" <> _} = conn, opts) do
    {:ok, body, _conn} = Conn.read_body(conn, opts)
    conn = update_in(conn.assigns[:raw_body], &[body | &1 || []])
    {:ok, body, conn}
  end

  def read_body(conn, opts), do: Conn.read_body(conn, opts)
end

which then allows you to use the Phoenix.Router.forward/4 in the router.ex:

  scope "/api" do
    pipe_through :api

    forward "/foo", ReverseProxyPlug,
      upstream: &Settings.foo_url/0,
      error_callback: &__MODULE__.log_reverse_proxy_error/1

    def log_reverse_proxy_error(error) do
      Logger.warn("ReverseProxyPlug network error: #{inspect(error)}")
    end
  end

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2018 Tallarium Technologies

ReverseProxyPlug is released under the MIT License.