Configure a reverse proxy

Synopsis

Flow Production Tracking is a service that can be scaled if the traditional single server topology can no longer sustain the load. One of the first optimization steps is to increase the number of Flow Production Tracking Application servers.

We recommend that you set up your own load balancing to distribute the load between your multiple Flow Production Tracking Application servers.

To get you started, we provide an example HAProxy container that acts as a reverse proxy. This example can be useful if you have a setup with only one shotgun-app server. The proxy automatically shows a maintenance page if you stop the shotgun-app container during an upgrade.

Configuring the reverse proxy

Please refer to the Reference Docker Compose file for a configuration example for HAProxy.

1. In your docker-compose.yml file, add the proxy service following the reference example
2. Make sure the lines are not commented out
3. Remove the port mapping section from the app service

Finally, start the new container:

 sudo docker-compose up -d 

Customisation

There are three Docker volumes for the proxy service referenced in the example Docker Compose file:

• proxy/certs: SSL certificates should be placed here.
• proxy/config: This directory contains the haproxy.cfg file.
• proxy/custom_errors: HTML pages to be served by HAProxy should be placed here. A Flow Production Tracking maintenance example is included.

Maintenance

To avoid downtime, you can reload HAProxy after making configuration changes. New connections will use the modified configuration and existing connections are allowed to finish gracefully. Simply run:

 sudo docker-compose exec proxy haproxy-reload 

Please note that changes to the proxy service in Docker Compose still require a short downtime to apply by running:

 sudo docker-compose up -d 

Requirements

• The Flow Production Tracking Application service, in the Docker Compose file, must be named "app"