HAProxy 1.6-dev1

Yesterday, Willy has released HAProxy 1.6-dev1: ANNOUNCE HAProxy 1.6-dev1.
This version contains many new features and core improvements. Amongst the new features, one is LUA, contributed by Thierry (HAProxy Technologies developer).

NOTE: We invite everyone to download and test HAProxy 1.6-dev1 and to report bugs to the mailing list.

Please note that there may be a code freeze of HAProxy 1.6 in May. Purpose is to release a stable version in September.

LUA

LUA is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.

More about lua

The main advantage of LUA for HAProxy is to give the ability to anyone to write their own features without having to know writing C code and patching HAProxy…

About this article

Please note that LUA integration in HAProxy is brand new. So the information provided here are true today but may be obsolete later, because of internal changes and updates.

Compiling HAProxy and LUA

Installaing LUA 5.3

For now, HAProxy requires LUA 5.3 to work, here is the procedure to install it:

cd /usr/src
curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.3.0.tar.gz
tar zxf lua-5.3.0.tar.gz
cd lua-5.3.0
make linux
sudo make INSTALL_TOP=/opt/lua53 install

LUA 5.3 library and include files are now installed in /opt/lua53.

Compiling HAProxy for lua

Since HAProxy is in a dev state, we may encounter some bugs. Let’s enable some debugging features:

make DEBUG=-ggdb CFLAGS=-O0 TARGET=linux2628 
USE_LUA=yes LUA_LIB=/opt/lua53/lib/ 
LUA_INC=/opt/lua53/include/ LDFLAGS=-ldl

Using LUA in HAProxy

turning HAProxy as a mirror web server

By mirror web server, I mean a web server which returns the request in the body of the response, without any modification.
It may be useful to use in HAProxy when you want to setup some HTTP header manipulation in HAProxy and you want to see the result. (It is more convenient than tcpdump).

* First, the HAProxy configuration:

global
 lua-load ./mylua.lua

defaults
 mode http
 timeout connect 1s
 timeout client 1s
 timeout server 1s

frontend fe
 bind 127.0.0.1:8001 name fe
 acl debugme req.hdr_cnt(X-debug-me) ge 1
 # add your http manipulation rules here
 http-request lua mirror if debugme
 default_backend be

backend be
 server s 127.0.0.1:8002

* And the LUA which does the mirroring of the request:

-- a simple mirror web server
-- it generates a response whose body contains the requests headers
function mirror(txn)
  local buffer = ""
  local response = ""
  local mydate = txn.sc:http_date(txn.f:date())

  buffer = buffer .. "You sent the following headersrn"
  buffer = buffer .. "===============================================rn"
  buffer = buffer .. txn.req:dup()
  buffer = buffer .. "===============================================rn"

  response = response .. "HTTP/1.0 200 OKrn"
  response = response .. "Server: haproxy-lua/mirrorrn"
  response = response .. "Content-Type: text/htmlrn"
  response = response .. "Date: " .. mydate .. "rn"
  response = response .. "Content-Length: " .. buffer:len() .. "rn"
  response = response .. "Connection: closern"
  response = response .. "rn"
  response = response .. buffer

  txn.res:send(response)
  txn:close()
end

Some explanations:
* mydate is the result of an HAProxy converter txn.sc:http_date applied to an HAProxy fetch txn.f:date()
* The call to txn.req:dup returns the content of HAProxy’s buffer request.

Testing: simply run a curl against HAProxy, don’t forget to send a X-debug-me HTTP header with the parameter -H "X-debug-me: yes". HAProxy should return your request in the response body:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: haproxy-lua/mirror
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2015 13:06:44 GMT
Content-Length: 208
Connection: keep-alive

You sent the following headers
===============================================
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.41.0
Host: 127.0.0.1:8001
Accept: */*

===============================================

Links

• HAProxy Technologies
• Aloha load balancer: HAProxy based LB appliance
• HAPee: HAProxy Enterprise