fastify-http-proxy

Proxy your HTTP requests to another server, with hooks. This fastify plugin forwards all requests received with a given prefix (or none) to an upstream. All Fastify hooks are still applied.

fastify-http-proxy is built on top of fastify-reply-from, which enables single route proxying.

This plugin can be used in a variety of circumstances, for example if you have to proxy an internal domain to an external domain (useful to avoid CORS problems) or to implement your own API gateway for a microservices architecture.

Requirements

Fastify 3.x. See this branch and related versions for Fastify 1.x compatibility and this tag for Fastify 2.x.

Install

npm i fastify-http-proxy fastify

Example

const Fastify = require('fastify')
const server = Fastify()

server.register(require('fastify-http-proxy'), {
  upstream: 'http://my-api.example.com',
  prefix: '/api', // optional
  http2: false // optional
})

server.listen(3000)

This will proxy any request starting with /api to http://my-api.example.com. For instance http://localhost:3000/api/users will be proxied to http://my-api.example.com/users.

If you want to have different proxies on different prefixes you can register multiple instances of the plugin as shown in the following snippet:

const Fastify = require('fastify')
const server = Fastify()
const proxy = require('fastify-http-proxy')

// /api/x will be proxied to http://my-api.example.com/x
server.register(proxy, {
  upstream: 'http://my-api.example.com',
  prefix: '/api', // optional
  http2: false // optional
})

// /auth/user will be proxied to http://single-signon.example.com/signon/user
server.register(proxy, {
  upstream: 'http://single-signon.example.com',
  prefix: '/auth', // optional
  rewritePrefix: '/signon', // optional
  http2: false // optional
})

server.listen(3000)

Notice that in this case it is important to use the prefix option to tell the proxy how to properly route the requests across different upstreams.

Also notice paths in upstream are ignored, so you need to use rewritePrefix to specify the target base path.

For other examples, see example.js.

Request tracking

fastify-http-proxy can track and pipe the request-id across the upstreams. Using the hyperid module and the fastify-reply-from built-in options a fairly simple example would look like this:

const Fastify = require('fastify')
const proxy = require('fastify-http-proxy')
const hyperid = require('hyperid')

const server = Fastify()
const uuid = hyperid()

server.register(proxy, {
  upstream: 'http://localhost:4001',
  replyOptions: {
    rewriteRequestHeaders: (originalReq, headers) => ({...headers, 'request-id': uuid()})
  }
})


server.listen(3000);

Options

This fastify plugin supports all the options of fastify-reply-from plus the following.

Note that this plugin is fully encapsulated, and non-JSON payloads will be streamed directly to the destination.

upstream

An URL (including protocol) that represents the target server to use for proxying.

prefix

The prefix to mount this plugin on. All the requests to the current server starting with the given prefix will be proxied to the provided upstream.

The prefix will be removed from the URL when forwarding the HTTP request.

rewritePrefix

Rewrite the prefix to the specified string. Default: ''.

preHandler

A preHandler to be applied on all routes. Useful for performing actions before the proxy is executed (e.g. check for authentication).

proxyPayloads

When this option is false, you will be able to access the body but it will also disable direct pass through of the payload. As a result, it is left up to the implementation to properly parse and proxy the payload correctly.

For example, if you are expecting a payload of type application/xml, then you would have to add a parser for it like so:

fastify.addContentTypeParser('application/xml', (req, done) => {
  const parsedBody = parsingCode(req)
  done(null, parsedBody)
})

config

An object accessible within the preHandler via reply.context.config. See Config in the Fastify documentation for information on this option. Note: this is merged with other configuration passed to the route.

replyOptions

Object with reply options for fastify-reply-from.

httpMethods

An array that contains the types of the methods. Default: ['DELETE', 'GET', 'HEAD', 'PATCH', 'POST', 'PUT', 'OPTIONS'].

websocket

This module has partial support for forwarding websockets by passing a websocket option. All those options are going to be forwarded to fastify-websocket. A few things are missing:

1. forwarding headers as well as rewriteHeaders
2. request id logging
3. support ignoreTrailingSlash

Pull requests are welcome to finish this feature.

Benchmarks

The following benchmarks where generated on a dedicated server with an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz and 64GB of RAM:

Framework	req/sec
express-http-proxy	2557
http-proxy	9519
fastify-http-proxy	15919

The results were gathered on the second run of autocannon -c 100 -d 5 URL.

TODO

• Perform validations for incoming data
• Finish implementing websocket (follow TODO)

License

MIT