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by anderspitman 2067 days ago
Are you using a custom reverse proxy? For a recent project I started with Caddy but ended up needing some functionality it didn't have, and didn't need most of what it did have. I'm currently using a custom proxy layer, but I'm concerned I might end up having to implement more than I want to (I know I'll at least need gzip). Curious what your experience at fly has been with this.
2 comments
mrkurt 2067 days ago
We are! It's Rust + Hyper. It is a _lot_ of work, but that's because we're trying to proxy arbitrary client traffic to arbitrary backends AND give them geo load balancing.

Writing proxies is fun. Highly recommended.

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anderspitman 2066 days ago
Cool, thanks!

I was actually just playing with Hyper for a few hours last night. Are you guys using async/await yet? Any suggestions for learning materials for async rust other than the standard stuff?

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ignoramous 2067 days ago
another stupid question, but can't help it: golang seems like a popular choice among network developers. Any reason that made fly.io choose Rust over golang for the proxy?
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mrkurt 2067 days ago
Because of JavaScript. Really!

We settled on Rust back when we were building a JS runtime into our proxy. It's a great language for hosting v8. When we realized our customers just wanted to run any ol' code, and not be stuck in a v8 isolate, we extracted the proxy bits and kept them around.

I think you could build our proxy just fine in Go. One really nice thing about Rust, though, is the Hyper HTTP library. It's _much_ more flexible than Go's built in HTTP package, which turns out to be really useful for our particular product.

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mholt 2066 days ago
What functionality did you need that Caddy didn't have?
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anderspitman 2066 days ago
Hey Matt! I'm referring to the ability to change the Caddy config from an API that is itself proxied through Caddy. Here's the issue which you very helpful in[0].

Ultimately I realized that most of what I needed from Caddy was really just certmagic, which has worked flawlessly since I got it set up. Plus I need the final product to compile into a single binary. Since my custom reverse proxy only took a few lines of code, I haven't worried too much about it. But there are a few features which I'll have to integrate eventually.

If I end up seeing myself headed down the path of making a full-fledged reverse proxy, I'll reconsider trying to implement my project as a Caddy plugin.

[0]: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/3754

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