Pipy

Pipy is a high performance programmable network proxy. Written in C++, Pipy is extremely lightweight and fast, making it an ideal solution to service mesh proxies.

With the builtin JavaScript support, thanks to PipyJS, Pipy is highly customizable as well as predictable in performance since PipyJS opts for reference counting memory management and thus has no uneven garbage collection overhead we constantly see in other similar systems.

At its core, Pipy is of a modular design provided with a range of fundamental filters that can be chained up to make a pipeline, where network data is pumped in and get processed. The way Pipy is designed makes it extremely versatile even outside of a service mesh environment. Due to its scriptable nature, it also benefits any sorts of situations involving intermediate message processing between network nodes where Pipy can be used as a forward/backward proxy, a load balancer, an API gateway, a static HTTP server, a node in a CDN, a health checker, a serverless function trigger, or however you want to combine all those features by just a few lines of script.

Compatibility

Pipy is designed for high compatibility across different operating systems and CPU architectures. Pipy has been fully tested on these platforms:

CentOS 7
Ubuntu 18/20
FreeBSD 12/13
macOS Big Sur

CentOS7/REHL7 or FreeBSD are recommended in production environments.

How to Build

Build from Scratch

Before building, the following prerequisites are required to be installed first:

Clang 5.0+
CMake 3.0+
Node.js v12+ (only required if the builtin web UI is enabled)
zlib

With the above all installed, run the build script to start building:

./build.sh

The final executable product will be located under bin/. Type bin/pipy -h for help information.

Build a Docker Image

To build a Docker image, run the following commands:

cd pipy
sudo docker build --squash --rm -t pipy .

Note: For a smaller image, you might want to use --squash option. It is an experimental feature, so you need to add { "experimental": true } to /etc/docker/daemon.json and restart Docker daemon before using it.

For more information about Docker's --squash option, please refer to Docker Documentation

Quick Start

Install with RPM

yum -y install http://repo.flomesh.cn/pipy/pipy-latest.el7_pl.x86_64.rpm

Show Command Line Options

$ pipy --help

List Builtin Filters and Their Parameters

$ pipy --list-filters
$ pipy --help-filters

Run on CLI

To start a Pipy proxy, run pipy with a PipyJS script file, for example, the script in test/001-echo/ if you need a simple echo server that responds with the same message body as in every incoming request:

$ pipy test/001-echo/pipy.js

Alternatively, while developing and debugging, one can start Pipy in web UI mode without specifying any specific script file but only a working directory:

$ pipy test/ --gui-port=6060

Run in Docker

The Pipy Docker image can be configured with a few environment variables:

PIPY_CONFIG_FILE=</path/to/config-file> for the location of Pipy configuration file
PIPY_SPAWN=n for the number of Pipy instances you want to start, where n is the number of instantces subtracted by 1. For example, you use PIPY_SPAWN=3 for 4 instances.

docker run -it --rm -e PIPY_CONFIG_FILE=/etc/pipy/test/001-echo/pipy.cfg flomesh/pipy-pjs:latest

docker run -it --rm -e PIPY_CONFIG_FILE=/etc/pipy/test/011-serve-static/pipy.cfg -e PIPY_SPAWN=1 -p 8000:6000 flomesh/pipy-pjs:latest

Run on Kubernetes

You can run Pipy on Kubernetes by using pipy-operator:

git clone https://github.com/flomesh-io/pipy-operator
cd pipy-operator
kubectl apply -f etc/cert-manager-v1.1.0.yaml
kubectl apply -f artifact/pipy-operator.yaml
kubectl apply -f config/samples/standalone/001-echo.yaml
kubectl apply -f config/samples/ingress/001-routing.yaml
kubectl apply -f config/samples/sidecar/007-deployment-pipy.yaml

Documentation

You can find Pipy documentation under docs/.

Copyright & License

Please refer to COPYRIGHT and LICENCE.

Contact

For security issues, please email to security@flomesh.io
For legal issues, please email to legal@flomesh.io
For commercial, sales and marketing topics, please email to sales@flomesh.io
For other topics not suitable for the public, please email to pipy@flomesh.io
For public discussions, please go to GitHub issues: https://github.com/flomesh-io/pipy/issues

Beaver-Company / pipy