A request/response rewriting HTTP proxy. A Rack app. Subclass Rack::Proxy
and provide your rewrite_env
and rewrite_response
methods.
Installation
Add the following to your Gemfile
:
gem 'rack-proxy', '~> 0.7.6'
Or install:
gem install rack-proxy
Use Cases
Below are some examples of real world use cases for Rack-Proxy. If you have done something interesting, add it to the list below and send a PR.
- Allowing one app to act as central trust authority
- handle accepting self-sign certificates for internal apps
- authentication / authorization prior to proxying requests to a blindly trusting backend
- avoiding CORs complications by proxying from same domain to another backend
- subdomain based pass-through to multiple apps
- Complex redirect rules
- redirect pages with different extensions (ex:
.php
) to another app - useful for handling awkward redirection rules for moved pages
- redirect pages with different extensions (ex:
- fan Parallel Requests: turning a single API request to multiple concurrent backend requests & merging results.
- inserting or stripping headers required or problematic for certain clients
Options
Options can be set when initializing the middleware or overriding a method.
:streaming
- defaults totrue
, but does not work on all Ruby versions, recommend to set tofalse
:ssl_verify_none
- tellNet::HTTP
to not validate certs:ssl_version
- tellNet::HTTP
to set a specificssl_version
:backend
- the URI parseable format of host and port of the target proxy backend. If not set it will assume the backend target is the same as the source.:read_timeout
- set proxy timeout it defaults to 60 seconds
To pass in options, when you configure your middleware you can pass them in as an optional hash.
Rails.application.config.middleware.use ExampleServiceProxy, backend: 'http://guides.rubyonrails.org', streaming: false
Examples
See and run the examples below from lib/rack_proxy_examples/
. To mount any example into an existing Rails app:
- create
config/initializers/proxy.rb
- modify the file to require the example file
require 'rack_proxy_examples/forward_host'
Forward request to Host and Insert Header
Test with require 'rack_proxy_examples/forward_host'
class ForwardHost < Rack::Proxy
def rewrite_env(env)
env["HTTP_HOST"] = "example.com"
env
end
def rewrite_response(triplet)
status, headers, body = triplet
# example of inserting an additional header
headers["X-Foo"] = "Bar"
# if you rewrite env, it appears that content-length isn't calculated correctly
# resulting in only partial responses being sent to users
# you can remove it or recalculate it here
headers["content-length"] = nil
triplet
end
end
Disable SSL session verification when proxying a server with e.g. self-signed SSL certs
Test with require 'rack_proxy_examples/trusting_proxy'
class TrustingProxy < Rack::Proxy
def rewrite_env(env)
env["HTTP_HOST"] = "self-signed.badssl.com"
# We are going to trust the self-signed SSL
env["rack.ssl_verify_none"] = true
env
end
def rewrite_response(triplet)
status, headers, body = triplet
# if you rewrite env, it appears that content-length isn't calculated correctly
# resulting in only partial responses being sent to users
# you can remove it or recalculate it here
headers["content-length"] = nil
triplet
end
end
The same can be achieved for all requests going through the Rack::Proxy
instance by using
Rack::Proxy.new(ssl_verify_none: true)
Rails middleware example
Test with require 'rack_proxy_examples/example_service_proxy'
###
# This is an example of how to use Rack-Proxy in a Rails application.
#
# Setup:
# 1. rails new test_app
# 2. cd test_app
# 3. install Rack-Proxy in `Gemfile`
# a. `gem 'rack-proxy', '~> 0.7.6'`
# 4. install gem: `bundle install`
# 5. create `config/initializers/proxy.rb` adding this line `require 'rack_proxy_examples/example_service_proxy'`
# 6. run: `SERVICE_URL=http://guides.rubyonrails.org rails server`
# 7. open in browser: `http://localhost:3000/example_service`
#
###
ENV['SERVICE_URL'] ||= 'http://guides.rubyonrails.org'
class ExampleServiceProxy < Rack::Proxy
def perform_request(env)
request = Rack::Request.new(env)
# use rack proxy for anything hitting our host app at /example_service
if request.path =~ %r{^/example_service}
backend = URI(ENV['SERVICE_URL'])
# most backends required host set properly, but rack-proxy doesn't set this for you automatically
# even when a backend host is passed in via the options
env["HTTP_HOST"] = backend.host
# This is the only path that needs to be set currently on Rails 5 & greater
env['PATH_INFO'] = ENV['SERVICE_PATH'] || '/configuring.html'
# don't send your sites cookies to target service, unless it is a trusted internal service that can parse all your cookies
env['HTTP_COOKIE'] = ''
super(env)
else
@app.call(env)
end
end
end
Using as middleware to forward only some extensions to another Application
Test with require 'rack_proxy_examples/rack_php_proxy'
Example: Proxying only requests that end with ".php" could be done like this:
###
# Open http://localhost:3000/test.php to trigger proxy
###
class RackPhpProxy < Rack::Proxy
def perform_request(env)
request = Rack::Request.new(env)
if request.path =~ %r{\.php}
env["HTTP_HOST"] = ENV["HTTP_HOST"] ? URI(ENV["HTTP_HOST"]).host : "localhost"
ENV["PHP_PATH"] ||= '/manual/en/tutorial.firstpage.php'
# Rails 3 & 4
env["REQUEST_PATH"] = ENV["PHP_PATH"] || "/php/#{request.fullpath}"
# Rails 5 and above
env['PATH_INFO'] = ENV["PHP_PATH"] || "/php/#{request.fullpath}"
env['content-length'] = nil
super(env)
else
@app.call(env)
end
end
def rewrite_response(triplet)
status, headers, body = triplet
# if you proxy depending on the backend, it appears that content-length isn't calculated correctly
# resulting in only partial responses being sent to users
# you can remove it or recalculate it here
headers["content-length"] = nil
triplet
end
end
To use the middleware, please consider the following:
- For Rails we could add a configuration in
config/application.rb
config.middleware.use RackPhpProxy, {ssl_verify_none: true}
- For Sinatra or any Rack-based application:
class MyAwesomeSinatra < Sinatra::Base
use RackPhpProxy, {ssl_verify_none: true}
end
This will allow to run the other requests through the application and only proxy the requests that match the condition from the middleware.
See tests for more examples.
SSL proxy for SpringBoot applications debugging
Whenever you need to debug communication with external services with HTTPS protocol (like OAuth based) you have to be able to access to your local web app through HTTPS protocol too. Typical way is to use nginx or Apache httpd as a reverse proxy but it might be inconvinuent for development environment. Simple proxy server is a better way in this case. The only what we need is to unpack incoming SSL queries and proxy them to a backend. We can prepare minimal set of files to create autonomous proxy server.
Create config.ru
file:
#
# config.ru
#
require 'rack'
require 'rack-proxy'
class ForwardHost < Rack::Proxy
def rewrite_env(env)
env['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST'] = env['SERVER_NAME']
env['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] = env['rack.url_scheme']
env
end
end
run ForwardHost.new(backend: 'http://localhost:8080')
Create Gemfile
file:
source "https://rubygems.org"
gem 'thin'
gem 'rake'
gem 'rack-proxy'
Create config.yml
file with configuration of web server thin
:
---
ssl: true
ssl-key-file: keys/domain.key
ssl-cert-file: keys/domain.crt
ssl-disable-verify: false
Create 'keys' directory and generate SSL key and certificates files domain.key
and domain.crt
Run bundle exec thin start
for running it with thin
's default port.
Or use sudo -E thin start -C config.yml -p 443
for running with default for https://
port.
Don't forget to enable processing of X-Forwarded-...
headers on your application side. Just add following strings to your resources/application.yml
file.
---
server:
tomcat:
remote-ip-header: x-forwarded-for
protocol-header: x-forwarded-proto
use-forward-headers: true
Add some domain name like debug.your_app.com
into your local /etc/hosts
file like
127.0.0.1 debug.your_app.com
Next start the proxy and your app. And now you can access to your Spring application through SSL connection via https://debug.your_app.com
URI in a browser.
Using SSL/TLS certificates with HTTP connection
This may be helpful, when third-party API has authentication by client TLS certificates and you need to proxy your requests and sign them with certificate.
Just specify Rack::Proxy SSL options and your request will use TLS HTTP connection:
# config.ru
. . .
cert_raw = File.read('./certs/rootCA.crt')
key_raw = File.read('./certs/key.pem')
cert = OpenSSL::X509::Certificate.new(cert_raw)
key = OpenSSL::PKey.read(key_raw)
use TLSProxy, cert: cert, key: key, use_ssl: true, verify_mode: OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER, ssl_version: 'TLSv1_2'
And rewrite host for example:
# tls_proxy.rb
class TLSProxy < Rack::Proxy
attr_accessor :original_request, :query_params
def rewrite_env(env)
env["HTTP_HOST"] = "client-tls-auth-api.com:443"
env
end
end
WARNING
Doesn't work with fakeweb
/webmock
. Both libraries monkey-patch net/http code.
Todos
- Make the docs up to date with the current use case for this code: everything except streaming which involved a rather ugly monkey patch and only worked in 1.8, but does not work now.
- Improve and validate requirements for Host and Path rewrite rules
- Ability to inject logger and set log level