bloudermilk / node-router

A prototype host-based load balancing router for Node

Node Router

This is a prototype HTTP router written in Node JS. Its functionality was inspired by Heroku-style host routing. It utilizes Redis to coordinate round-robin load balancing among multiple routers.

Note: dotCloud recently released a full-featured production-ready proxy called hipache built on the same foundation as node-router.

Installation

All node dependencies are available via npm:

$ git clone git://github.com/bloudermilk/node-router.git
$ npm install

You'll also need a redis server.

Try it out

Starting the server is as easy as:

$ npm start

There are three environment variables you can use to configure the router:

• PORT: The port to bind the proxy to (default: 8080)
• REDIS_HOST: The host of the redis server to connect to (default: 6379)
• REDIS_PORT: The port of the redis server to connect to (default: 127.0.0.1)

For example:

$ PORT=80 REDIS_PORT=6666 npm start

Once your have the router running, seed the DB:

$ redis-cli
redis 127.0.0.1:6379> RPUSH Route:127.0.0.1:8080 127.0.0.1:8090
(integer) 1
redis 127.0.0.1:6379> RPUSH Route:127.0.0.1:8080 127.0.0.1:8091
(integer) 2

This configures the router to take all requests to port 8080 on localhost and route them to ports 8090 and 8091.

Testing

I included a "hello world" node app to test the functionality. You can run as many as you would like behind the router like so:

$ PORT=8090 node test/client.js

Tips

The node-redis library will automatically take advantage of the native hiredis package if you have it installed. This can result in massive speed improvements over the pure javascript library. Install it with npm:

$ npm install hiredis