wolfgang42 / webd

Sort of like inetd but for web services only.

webd - HTTP super-server

Sort of like inetd but for web services only.

Spins services up on demand and then proxies to them, shutting them down after they don't get any requests for a while.

Features:

• Zero dependencies outside of Node standard library
• Host-based routing
• Automatic startup and shutdown of backends

Bugs (patches gladly accepted!):

• Primitive error handling (dump a stack trace into the HTTP response)
• No support for HTTPS, on either end
• Probably doesn't handle things like websockets
• No logging support
• No test suite

Usage

Synopsis

./webd.js ./config.example.json

Configuration

webd.js expects one argument, a config.js or config.json file (see config.example.json).

Config options:

• listen (required, object): Options for server.listen().
• indexHost (optional, string): If specified, a Host name which will be served a simple HTML page with links to all available backends.
• backends (required, object): Map of Host name to backend configurations with the following keys:
  • connectionOptions (required, object): Options for http.request(). host defaults to "localhost" unless overridden.
  • run (optional, object): Options for starting the backend.
    • cwd (optional, string): directory to cd to before starting the command
    • command (required, string): command to run
    • args (required, string[]): arguments to pass to command (note that they must be split already unless you're using shell)
    • shell (optional, boolean): If true, command is passed to a shell; see child_process.spawn() for details.
  • shutdownAfter (optional, number, milliseconds): How long to wait for another request before shutting down the backend. (If not specified, the backend will be started on the first request and will never be shut down.)