cirocosta / l7

Minimal HTTP 1.1 Proxy & Load-balancer

l7 📂

Minimal HTTP 1.1 load-balancer

Overview

l7 is a load-balancer responsible for performing load-balancing based on parameters passed to it or a configuration file.

It allows you to, in a single line, specify a set of servers and have load sent uniformily to them.

Command Line

In order to facilitate testing it's possible to specify all the arguments from the configuration file via parameters to the l7 command.

Usage: l7 [--port PORT] [--config CONFIG] [--user USER] [SERVERS [SERVERS ...]]

Positional arguments:
  SERVERS

Options:
  --port PORT, -p PORT   port to listen to [default: 80]
  --config CONFIG, -c CONFIG
                         configuration file to use
  --user USER
  --help, -h             display this help and exit


Example:
  sudo l7 \
        --user admin:admin \		# enforces basic auth on all requests
        --user someone:mypasswd \		
        --port 80 \			# binds to port 80
         mydomain.com=127.0.0.1:8081 \	# list of server configurations
         mydomain.com=127.0.0.1:8082 \
         mydomain.com=127.0.0.1:8083 \
         example.io=127.0.0.1:1337

In the example above we make l7 listen on port 80 and place two rules for load-balancing:

• requests to mydomain.com should be split across 3 servers listening on 127.0.0.1
• requests to example.io should go to 127.0.0.1:1337
• every request to either mydomain.com or example.io must be authenticated

Configuration file

The configuration file can be located anywhere on disk. To use one, specify '-c|--config' configuration parameter to the l7 command:

l7 --config ./config.yml   # use configuration from ./config.yml

The configuration is composed of few definitions. Changing the following example should be enough to get going.

# config.yml
port: 80	
users:			# optional
  myuser: 'passwd'
  admin: 'admin'
backends:
  example.com:
    servers:
      - address: 'http://192.168.0.103:8081'
      - address: '//192.168.0.103:8082'         # no 'http(s)://' needed
      - address: 'http://nginx'                 # hostnames can be used
                                                # note.: dns resolution
                                                #        will take place.

Above we're specifying that:

• we want l7 listening on port 80 (this will require using sudo - a privileged user - to continue)
• those requests with host set to example.com should be load-balanced across 3 distinct servers
• all requests must be authenticated with either myuser:passwd or admin:admin. Note.: this configuration is not required.

Once initialized, the configuration can be reloaded without the need of restarting the whole process. Send a SIGHUP to the pid of the load-balancer to reload it on the fly.

Note.: in the case of errors, l7 won't crash, but retain the last valid configuration.

To visualize the latest configuration, send a SIGUSR1 to the process. This will dump to stdout the configuration loaded by the flb.