Nanoproxy

Nanoproxy is a small (and likely noncompliant) combination of two protocols - HTTP request proxying and mDNS advertisements. It is designed for proxying multiple services running on a single host such as a raspberry pi within a local network. It uses mDNS to advertise all of the configured hostnames, then proxies the requests that come in to the upstream systems.

Example

Imagine that you have a rasberry pi running grafana on port 3000 and prometheus on port 5000. You want to be able to access these services from other computers on your local network without remembering IP addresses, ports, or doing a lot of configuration work. Nanoproxy is ideal for this use-case. Write the following config file to /etc/nanoconfig.toml on your raspberry pi:

[[services]]
host_name = "prometheus"
upstream_address = "http://localhost:5000"

[[services]]
host_name = "grafana"
upstream_address = "http://localhost:3000"

You can then run nanoproxy, it will load the config file and you can navigate to http://prometheus.local or http://grafana.local in a web browser from any computer on your network.

Management interface

You can optionally enable a management interface by setting management.enabled = true in your config file. This will cause a service to be advertised at http://nanoproxy.local:{listen_port} which can be used to view all of the available nanoproxy services. You can change this advertised hostname by setting management.host_name

Goals

• Ease-of-use
• Low resource usage

Non-goals of this project

• Security
  • Proxy authentication headers
  • HTTPS support