lite-proxyserver

Lightweight development only node server that serves a web app, mock rest endpoints and allows proxy requests to real backends.

Why

During SPA development you want to code and test your SPA as fast as possible. Long term deployment round trips are not desired by your developers. The need for a fast and independent development deployment encourages a lite-server. The node based server is running locally and serves the SPA contents (HTML, CSS, JS). Changes to our development files can be 'watch'ed additionally in order to live update your coding changes to the server.

During further development your team will encounter the need for REST endpoints. In a first step you want to mock those as easy as possible. This lite-server enables you to use a REST middleware pointing to a specific REST service implementation based on connect-rest.

After covering SPA development and REST mock implementation you finally want to run your whole app in a real environment. When you start deploying and testing your app in the runtime environment you still will encounter the need for local bugfixing against a running environment. The local running lite-server now comes in and provides you a way to configure your node server to proxy requests against any real backend environment. So the SPA content is provided from local node server and the SPA rest endpoint will target the same local node server - but this one will proxy those requests to your target environment. This way you wont get any CORS problems and you can dynamically switch the backend between a local mock implementation, a colleagues implementation or a stable environment.

Architecture

The lite-proxyserver depends on several modules. Most important dependency is connect. While you could build it also on other server implementations just like express or hapi we had to choose a specific server implementation early some years ago and came up with connect. We just rely on the ability to use server middlewares as easy as possible.

So based on the first dependency all further middlewares are connect based. We use connect-rest for the local REST service implementation and connect-proxy. A simple redirect middleware is handwritten. A proxyPassReverse functionality is provided for response headers handwritten and for html body content rewriting we are using tamper.

The following image should visualize the local lite-proxyserver including all middlewares used.

As you should have noticed by now this module strongly depends on grunt. The server integrates well in a grunt build process.

Installation

The recommended installation method is a local NPM install for your project:

$ npm install lite-proxyserver --save-dev

Basically you simple add it as a devDependency into your projects package.json.

Inside your projects Gruntfile.js you can integrate the lite-proxyserver by this snippet

module.exports = function (grunt) {
    grunt.loadNpmTasks("lite-proxyserver")
};

Configuration

The configuration of the lite-proxyserver and all its features is done within the package.json of your project. Alternatively a different configuration can be provided by setting the '--package.json' command line option.

grunt lite-proxyserver --package.json=packageTest.json

The entries in the package.json will be validated with duckyjs using the following specification

{
    mock?:      ([{
            enabled?:           boolean,
            ctx?:               string,
            fallback?:          string,
            file:               string
        }*] | {
            enabled?:           boolean,
            ctx?:               string,
            fallback?:          string,
            file:               string
        }),
    proxy?:      {
        enabled?:               boolean,
        targetHosts:    {
            @:              {
                host:           string,
                port:           number
            }    
        },
        target:                 string,
        host?:                  string,
        port?:                  number,
        https?:                 boolean,
        base?:                  string,
        redirectRootToApp?:     string,
        cors?:                  boolean,
        proxyPassReverse?:      boolean,
        proxies?:               [object*]
    }
}

Since most of them have defaults or some are not self explaining see the following explainations:

configuration entry	command line option	default	explanation
mock	-	-	can be either one configuration object or be an array of those objects
mock.enabled	--mock.enabled	true	mock implementation is generally activated by defining a mock.file; this switch exists to disable the mocking without deleting the rest of the configuration
mock.ctx	--mock.ctx	'/mock'	the context for local REST services; mocked services must use a unique context beside the proxied services because this way the middlewares can seperate mock requests from proxy requests
mock.fallback	--mock.fallback	-	in case that a combination of mock and proxy are used it is often important to not proxy all request. Often you want to proxy some of the services and use mocks for the rest. The fallback redirects not proxied requests by redirecting them to the specific mock definition
mock.file	--mock.file	-	the mock file is a string pointing to the mock implementation. That implementation should require the connect-rest middleware and export it as 'rest'; An example can be found in uica-skeleton
proxy.enabled	--proxy.enabled	true	proxy functionality is generally activated; this switch exists to disable the proxy without deleting the rest of the configuration
proxy.targetHosts	--proxy.targetHosts.{name}.host --proxy.targetHosts.{name}.port	-	in order to switch proxy targets fast you can define all your possible targets in this place. The @ enables you to give each target a specific name that can be used as a reference at proxy.target
proxy.target	--proxy.target	-	this chooses the concrete proxy target from the proxy.targetHosts list
proxy.host	--proxy.host	'localhost'	this is the local node servers hostname. Your browser should be able to fetch your SPA from the defined proxy.host:proxy.port
proxy.port	--proxy.port	2345	this is the local node servers port. Your browser should be able to fetch your SPA from the defined proxy.host:proxy.port
proxy.https	--proxy.https	false	simple switch that determines the local node servers protocol. By default it uses http but it can be switched to https
proxy.base	--proxy.base	'htdocs'	this is the document root directory for the static content your node server should deliver
proxy.redirectRootToApp	--proxy.redirectRootToApp	-	this switch enables a simple middleware that handles incoming requests to '/' by redirecting to a specific context. this is useful if your app is deployed under a long context and you want to shortcut the browser URL.
proxy.cors	--proxy.cors	false	activates the CORS middleware that adds 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *' response headers to all responses
proxy.proxyPassReverse	--proxy.proxyPassReverse	true	this enables the proxy pass reverse functionality. It handles the rewriting of target proxy URLs in responses (headers and body) back to origin local URLs
proxy.proxies	-	-	this defines a list of proxy URLs that should result in a proxy request. Basically this is a list of connect-proxy configuration objects with one addition: the attribute 'hostRewrite' will result in a dynamic replacement of the proxy request header attribute 'host' set to the local node servers host and port.

Command line options overwrite any options from the package.json configuration. Example for providing command line options.

grunt lite-proxyserver --proxy.port=4711 --proxy.https=true   

An integration and configuration example of the lite-proxyserver can be found in the uica-skeleton.

Changes

• 0.8.0: the old version of connect-rest had to be correct since its dependencies relied on 'latest' versions. You have to use require('connect-rest-msg') in your rest-services file.

License

Code released under the MIT license.