Blackbird

Blackbird is a reverse proxy, with built-in node cluster and load balancing.

Installation

To install Blackbird you can easily run below command:

npm i @namatery/blackbird

How to use Blackbird?

First of all, create a proxy server like below:

const proxy = new ReversProxy({
  http: {
    port: 3000,
  },
});

NOTE: http.port is required.

Registering

To register a domain, do like this:

proxy.register({
  source: 'http://localhost:3000/',
  target: 'http://test.com/',
  opts: {
    redirect: false,
    ws: false,
  },
});

Options

• source [required]: The url that client make a request to it.
• target [required]: The url that if client makes a reqeust to source, Blackbird redirects the request to it.
• redirect [optional]: If set true, Blackbird automatically redirects to HTTPS.
• ws [optional]: If set true, Blackbird allows clients to make socket connection.

Notice

• You can set several target for a single source.
• Before set redirect as true, make sure you have configured proxy for HTTPS requests.
• For load balancing, Blackbird uses round-robin algorithm.

Enable HTTPS

To enable HTTPS, you can pass creditions like below:

const proxy = new ReversProxy({
  http: {
    port: 3000,
  },
  https: {
    port: 9000,
    cert: 'path/to/cert.pem',
    key: 'path/to/key.pem',
    ca: 'path/to/ca.pem',
  },
});

NOTE 1: port is required.

NOTE 2: cert, key and ca can be buffers. (ca is optional)

In the above example, the creditoins that we set wil use for all registerd domain, but you can also attach the creditions for a specifyed domain.

proxy.attachSSL({
  hostname: 'localhost:3000',
  cert: 'path/to/cert.pem',
  key: 'path/to/key.pem',
  ca: 'path/to/ca.pem',
});

NOTE 1: hostname is the hostname that we registerd as source above as you saw.

NOTE 2: You can't attach several creditions for a single hostname.

How to run our proxy?

To start proxy, you have two options. You can either run it in the normal way like below:

proxy.start();

Or run it in the cluster mode like below:

proxy.startCluster(3);

In this case Blackbird will run three instances of our proxy. To learn more about cluster in nodejs go to node-cluster.

Does Blackbird handle CORS in its own?

Yes! Blackbird uses Express Cors package to handle this concept and you can enable it like below:

const proxy = new ReversProxy({
  http: {
    port: 3000,
  },
  cors: {
    origin: 'http://localhost:3000/'
  }
});

NOTE 1: All the options is similar with Express Cors package.

TODOs

• Writing Unite test for Table repository.
• Writing Unite test for SSL repository.
• CORS error on redirecting from http to https.
• CORS error on websocket communication.
• Writing Unite test for proxy class.