Balancing load with Hipache

Hipache is a distributed proxy designed to route high volumes of HTTP and WebSocket traffic. Hipache supports dynamic configuration via Redis, so changing the configuration and adding vhosts does not require a restart. Based on the node-http-proxy library, Hipache provides support for load balancing websockets, SSL, dead backend detection, and is clustered for failover. Let's install it:

npm install hipache -g

Let's setup a host for both vision-web and vision-api by editing the hosts file:

sudo nano /private/etc/hosts

Add two new entries:

127.0.0.1  web.vision.net
127.0.0.1  api.vision.net

And then flush the cache for these changes to take effect:

dscacheutil -flushcache

In order to configure a server, we will need a configuration file for each application we want to load balance. In our case, it is vision-web and vision-api. Here is the configuration file for vision-api, ./config/server.json. Importantly, we are running vision-api on port 8443. We configure...