Circumvent load balancing without changing Caddyfile

1. Caddy version (caddy version):

v2.5.1 h1:bAWwslD1jNeCzDa+jDCNwb8M3UJ2tPa8UZFFzPVmGKs=

2. How I run Caddy:

a. System environment:

Ubuntu 20.04 with apt package - copy paste installation from the documentation

b. Command:

vim /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

c. Service/unit/compose file:

d. My complete Caddyfile or JSON config:

{
	# Enable Debug mode
	# debug

	# Disable admin API
	admin off
}

application1.domain {
        header {
		# Hide "Server: Caddy"
			-Server
		}
	    
		# https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/log
		log {
			output file /var/log/caddy/app1.log
			format console
		}
		
        # Another common task is to set up a reverse proxy:
		# https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/reverse_proxy
		
		tls internal
		
        reverse_proxy * {
			to 10.1.0.10:8080 10.1.0.11:8080
			
			lb_policy cookie
			lb_try_duration 1s
			lb_try_interval 250ms
			
			health_uri     /status # Backend health check path
			health_interval 10s
			health_timeout  2s
			health_status   200
		 }
}
application2.domain {
        header {
		# Hide "Server: Caddy"
			-Server
		}
	    
		# https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/log
		log {
			output file /var/log/caddy/app2.log
			format console
		}
		
        # Another common task is to set up a reverse proxy:
		# https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/reverse_proxy
		
		tls internal
		
        reverse_proxy * {
			to 10.1.0.7:8090 10.1.0.8:8090
			
			lb_policy cookie
			lb_try_duration 1s
			lb_try_interval 250ms
			
			health_uri     /status # Backend health check path
			health_interval 10s
			health_timeout  2s
			health_status   200
		 }
}

3. The problem I’m having:

Hi everyone,
i have more of best practice question.

We are using caddy to provide reverse proxy / load balancing / sticky sessions to redundant backend systems (same application running in parallel on multiple servers as failover).

Before we used caddy, we used apache for this.
While using apache we used to set a cookie with a routing id as value for a specific backend.
e.g. routeid=backend01 or routeid=backend02

This was practical since we have different use-cases where we have to circumvent the active loadbalancing to access a specific node directly, without changing the caddy config (due to active users working on each backend instance)

first example: we use ansible to update single nodes and before putting them back into action, we check directly if the application / webfrontend is fully available again - thats only possible if we are not directed to the other instance.

second example: debugging of an application issues on one specific node (backend01 is running fine, backend02 is unstable and we need to check it through the frontend).

So for the question: How could i create the same “option” with caddy as the webserver - option = force the routing to a specific node “onDemand”.

If i can provide further information, let me know.

Thanks in advance and best regards
Alcesh

4. Error messages and/or full log output:

None…

5. What I already tried:

Using lb_policy cookie and trying to play around with the cookie content.
Reading the documentation about all the lb options and/or possible other ways like header manipulation.

6. Links to relevant resources:

The cookie value is basically just hash_hmac('sha256', dial_address, secret) (in your config you didn’t specify an HMAC secret, so it’s just an empty string in that case).

So with your favourite programming language, you can just calculate the HMAC like this and set it in your browser dev tools.

So like this (I’m using PHP here):

>>> hash_hmac('sha256', '10.1.0.10:8080', '')
=> "50796b5ceb6cd5372f6a7b4fdf42fbdd49554bce04e11e46a16f5adfc33c5bb7"

Then set the cookie in your browser or HTTP client headers (default cookie name is lb if you don’t specify one):

Cookie: lb=50796b5ceb6cd5372f6a7b4fdf42fbdd49554bce04e11e46a16f5adfc33c5bb7

I strongly recommend setting an HMAC secret, otherwise anyone can choose the backend they want to connect to.

lb_policy cookie CookieName YOUR_HMAC_SECRET

Hi francislavoie,
thank you very much.

We hoped to do this with human readable content in the cookies, since we are planning to run a loooot of caddys in the future, but we are also working on implementing a proper DNS solution which would change the config in all caddys to the same names in the end - so that should reduce the amount of hashes we need to track to a perfectly fine level.

So again - thanks for the wonderful help you provided us :slight_smile:

Best regards
Matthias

You could implement your own load balancing policy plugin if you want different behaviour. It’s pluggable. It just needs to implement the reverseproxy.Selector interface, in the http.reverse_proxy.selection_policies namespace.

Thank you very much for this addition.
I’m not (yet) into Go - but this sounds like a good motivation to start :smiley:

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