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jaylenw / HAProxy-transparent-web-services-routing.md
Created August 21, 2021 23:30 — forked from mhofman/HAProxy-transparent-web-services-routing.md
Leverage HAProxy to transparently route requests to web services identified by host name.

Web Service Fronting

Multiple Web properties on a single IP address

Hosting multiple websites on a single public IP address on the standard HTTP(S) ports is relatively easy with popular web servers like Apache, Nginx and lighttpd all supporting Virtual Hosts.
For Web Services which bundle their own HTTP server, things get more complicated, unless their HTTP stack can be shared somehow. More often than not, the application's HTTP stack listens directly on a dedicated TCP port.

Hosting multiple services on a single IP then requires using a fronting server listening on the standard HTTP port, and routing to the right backend service based on the host name or the path sent by the client.
Path based routing is cumbersome, usually requiring either the service to be aware of the path prefix, or a rewrite by the HTTP fronting server of all absolute URLs in the requests and responses.
Hostname based routing is more straightforward. The fronting server can just look at the [HTTP/1.1 Host header](https://tools