smart-proxy

smart-proxy is a tcp proxy that allows you to route tcp connections based on hostnames for ANY protocol

npm install smart-proxy

Usage

First start two services, a tcp service and a http service on two different ports (lets say 10001 and 10002)

var net = require('net')
var http = require('http')

var tcpServer = net.createServer(function(socket) {
  socket.end('hello from tcp server\n')
})

tcpServer.listen(10001)

var httpServer = http.createServer(function(req, res) {
  res.end('hello from http server\n')
})

httpServer.listen(10002)

Then start the proxy and add the two services.

var proxy = require('smart-proxy')
var server = proxy()

server.add('tcp-test', 10001, 'localhost')
server.add('http-test', 10002, 'localhost')

server.listen(10000)

You can now access each of the two services simply by using {service-name}.local as the dns host and 10000 as the port on the local machine.

curl http-test.local 10000 # prints hello from http server
nc tcp-test.local 10000 # prints hello from tcp server

How?

smart-proxy using dns to resolve each service name to a unique ip in the 127.x.x.x range. All of these addresses should be loopback addresses. When a connection is being proxied it simply checks which ip was used and proxies to the corresponding service.

Currently mdns is used to resolve the hostnames since that makes it work without having to setup a new name server on your machine.

OSX Notice

smart-proxy needs 127.x.x.x to all be loopback addresses. This just works on ubuntu but on osx you need to run the following command to get this working.

#!/bin/bash
for ((i=2;i<256;i++))
do
  sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.$i up
done

License

MIT