Configuring HAProxy

Overview

HAProxy CustomConfig allows you to configure an HAproxy load balancer via the Cloud 66 Dashboard. In addition to the settings described below, you could also refer to the HAProxy documentation for more information about configurations.

Change the HAProxy endpoint

By default, HAProxy will visit the / endpoint on your application every 2 seconds to determine its state. This endpoint may need to change if that endpoint isn't available to the load balancer.

You will want to look at the httpchk option to change the endpoint - the simplest solution is to create a low overhead non-auth HTTP route somewhere in your application.

For example, you could place a file called check/ in your /public folder, which would be served directly by Nginx (not your application). It would be available at /check/.

In this case, you could replace the httpchk section with this:

httpchk HEAD /check/ HTTP/1.0.

Configuring HAProxy with CustomConfig

You can customize the HAProxy configuration on your HAProxy server using CustomConfig (below).

CustomConfig uses the Liquid templating language. You can find many incredible guides and tutorials into the Liquid syntax around the web, but the syntax is easy enough to pick up in minutes.

The following variables are available to use in HAProxy CustomConfig.

Config variables

Variable Name	Type	Description
haproxy_username	string	Your HAProxy username
haproxy_password	string	Your HAProxy password
httpchk	string	Default value is "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" unless specified in your manifest file
balance	array	Default value is "roundrobin" unless specified in your manifest file
errorfile_lines	array	Default is empty array unless specified in your manifest file
servers	array	Array of "server" objects that are to be load balanced (see below)
server.ext_ipv4	string	External IPv4 address (server is one of the items in the "servers" array above)
server.int_ipv4	string	Internal IPv4 address (server is one of the items in the "servers" array above)

Commit HAProxy CustomConfig

Editing and committing HAProxy CustomConfig will do the following steps for your HAProxy web server:

Check the template for basic Liquid syntax errors
Compile the HAProxy configuration based on the information from your load balanced web servers
Upload the configuration to your HAProxy server
Reload HAProxy

This process will be stopped if an error is encountered.

Take extra care with config

A bad HAProxy configuration might stop your HAProxy server from working. Take extra care to make sure the configuration is correct.

Configuring HAProxy for maintenance mode

For containerized applications you can set your HAproxy to show a maintenance page when it cannot connect to the container.

Create custom maintenance page
Upload to haproxy server using the toolbelt:

cx upload -s stack_name --server haproxy_server_name maintenance.html

Move the file haproxy directory:

sudo mv /tmp/maintenance.html /etc/haproxy/maintenance.html

Configure haproxy to show the maintenance file by adding the below line to the end of the default section: errorfile 503 /etc/haproxy/maintenance.html

Configure HAProxy to use internal IPs

By default, HAProxy is configured to use the external IP address of your servers, but it can be changed to use the internal addresses if you have private networking enabled.

Simply replace any server.ext_ipv4 values with server.int_ipv4 using HAProxy CustomConfig (below).

Specify an HAProxy test interval

You can also specify your own test interval if you like - this is done in the server section of your HAProxy configuration. This section is on line 53 of the default configuration.

To change the test interval to every 30 seconds (instead of the default 2 seconds), the template should look like this:

server web {{ forloop.index }} {{ server.ext_ipv4 }}:80 cookie "LSW_WEB{{ forloop.index }}" check inter 30000

Please note the inter 3000 at the end - this defines the test interval as 3000 milliseconds. Once this template is applied, it looks like this:

server web1 107.170.99.39:80 cookie "LSW_WEB1" check inter 30000