Dynamic proxy status

Plugins
1

I saw a long time ago work by @abiosoft to make proxy support pluggable dynamic backends, like etcd, docker and things.

Did that go away? I find myself wanting to proxy into a set of docker containers.

I have made and run this before. It dynamically generates a caddyfile frim all running docker containers on a host with given ENV vars.

I want something a little simpler though. Something like a hand generated caddyfile with:

mydomain.tld {
   proxy {
      docker_container otherService_* 
   }
}

or something like that. It would use the docker api to find matching containers, discover the magic IP addresses and ports, and configure proxy to those.

I felt like that was in a PR for a long time, but couldn’t find anything on it.

I could make a new plugin, but it kinda requires interop with proxy in odd ways to avoid duplication.

2

Recently I stumbled upon https://traefik.io/, which seems to have nailed the whole dynamic configuration part down quite nicely. I’m not sure if it meets your needs and by no means is it a full replacement for Caddy, but it might be worth a look.

1 Like
3

Yeah, I suppose that could work. I’m kinda invested in caddy though. Would like to help make a solution that works if possible.

4

It looks like there is a dynamic-proxy branch that is quite stale at this point. Mostly looking for the history there and maybe talk about how to update it.

5

Ultimately, on top of or in conjunction with Abiola’s work, I think we need to rewrite and expand the proxy middleware to support dynamic backends; right now, Caddy proxies with a type called staticUpstream but having dynamic upstreams or different kind of upstreams would be immensely useful. Some refactoring would be required.

6

Yeah, was thinking it would be nice to have “plugins” to the proxy plugin itself. Implement an interface with something like WatchUpstreams(ch chan<- []string) or similar and can hook in new providers as additional plugins to the plugin.

Proxy code is scary to me though. Lots to go wrong.

7

Although for now I am just managing all services on a box with docker-compose and linking containers to caddy and using proxy / http://servicename:8666. Works pretty well.

8

It’s safe to say it is abandoned. It was an experiment and I never really had the time to make it into something.

I got couple of people reach out to build on it but haven’t heard anyone get back with their progress.

I also think this is the way to go.

Haha, yes.

9

(One of my big projects this summer might be to rewrite proxy. I’ll need some help though to make sure it integrates well with fancy dynamic backends.)

10

@captncraig I’m going to be investigating using consul-template soon; I’ll let you know how that works out for me.