Writing a Reverse Proxy Service in Spring Boot. With Spring boot Retry on Failures
In this microservice world, we always emphasize passing any HTTP request through the API/Service gateway layer that Connects Multiple micro-services with having a Bare minimum requirement of Logging all the requests and responses of each service for cleaner Visibility.
We can consider writing our reverse proxy layer in the following scenario.
1. Assume having API Service wrote some in another language like "PHP" or "Python", In which we need to transform the request partially.
2. Add Authorisation or Implement Retry When the Service Fails to respond to the request
3. Log all the request and response which flows through this reverse Proxy layer later push to Some Logging Stack like ELK
4. Implement Our Custom Tracing logic for the service propagation.
5. Or Re-Invent the wheel just for Fun
Let's Start with a Very Basic Example of a Dumb Request Forwarding layer that logs requests and responses,
In this example, I am using Springboot and its Embedded Tomcat Server. And Spring Spring retry Dependency to implement retry logic when requests do fail.
StartPoint :
Let us Wring Springboot controller intercepts all the requests and pass them on to the proxy service class.
package com.ashrithgn.example.proxyApp;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.http.HttpMethod;
import org.springframework.http.ResponseEntity;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestBody;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import java.net.URISyntaxException;
import java.util.UUID;
@RestController
public class ProxyController {
@Autowired
ProxyService service;
@RequestMapping("/**")
public ResponseEntity<String> sendRequestToSPM(@RequestBody(required = false) String body,
HttpMethod method, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws URISyntaxException {
return service.processProxyRequest(body,method,request,response, UUID.randomUUID().toString());
}
}
ProxySerivce
When we receive the request from the controller, Simple RestTemplate will perform the HTTP request to the required domain.
And this is the class that can be extended to our requirement like performing Custom Logging Or like in this example implementing retry when there are failures in the HTTP calls.
package com.ashrithgn.example.proxyApp;
import org.apache.logging.log4j.LogManager;
import org.apache.logging.log4j.Logger;
import org.apache.logging.log4j.ThreadContext;
import org.springframework.http.HttpEntity;
import org.springframework.http.HttpHeaders;
import org.springframework.http.HttpMethod;
import org.springframework.http.ResponseEntity;
import org.springframework.http.client.BufferingClientHttpRequestFactory;
import org.springframework.http.client.ClientHttpRequestFactory;
import org.springframework.http.client.SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory;
import org.springframework.retry.annotation.Backoff;
import org.springframework.retry.annotation.Recover;
import org.springframework.retry.annotation.Retryable;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Service;
import org.springframework.web.client.HttpStatusCodeException;
import org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate;
import org.springframework.web.util.UriComponentsBuilder;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import java.net.URI;
import java.net.URISyntaxException;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.Enumeration;
@Service
public class ProxyService {
String domain = "example.com";
private final static Logger logger = LogManager.getLogger(ProxyService.class);
@Retryable(exclude = {
HttpStatusCodeException.class}, include = Exception.class, backoff = @Backoff(delay = 5000, multiplier = 4.0), maxAttempts = 4)
public ResponseEntity<String> processProxyRequest(String body,
HttpMethod method, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, String traceId) throws URISyntaxException {
ThreadContext.put("traceId", traceId);
String requestUrl = request.getRequestURI();
//log if required in this line
URI uri = new URI("https", null, domain, -1, null, null, null);
// replacing context path form urI to match actual gateway URI
uri = UriComponentsBuilder.fromUri(uri)
.path(requestUrl)
.query(request.getQueryString())
.build(true).toUri();
HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
Enumeration<String> headerNames = request.getHeaderNames();
while (headerNames.hasMoreElements()) {
String headerName = headerNames.nextElement();
headers.set(headerName, request.getHeader(headerName));
}
headers.set("TRACE", traceId);
headers.remove(HttpHeaders.ACCEPT_ENCODING);
HttpEntity<String> httpEntity = new HttpEntity<>(body, headers);
ClientHttpRequestFactory factory = new BufferingClientHttpRequestFactory(new SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory());
RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate(factory);
try {
ResponseEntity<String> serverResponse = restTemplate.exchange(uri, method, httpEntity, String.class);
HttpHeaders responseHeaders = new HttpHeaders();
responseHeaders.put(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, serverResponse.getHeaders().get(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE));
logger.info(serverResponse);
return serverResponse;
} catch (HttpStatusCodeException e) {
logger.error(e.getMessage());
return ResponseEntity.status(e.getRawStatusCode())
.headers(e.getResponseHeaders())
.body(e.getResponseBodyAsString());
}
}
@Recover
public ResponseEntity<String> recoverFromRestClientErrors(Exception e, String body,
HttpMethod method, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, String traceId) {
logger.error("retry method for the following url " + request.getRequestURI() + " has failed" + e.getMessage());
logger.error(e.getStackTrace());
throw new RuntimeException("There was an error trying to process you request. Please try again later");
}
}
Main Application Class
package com.ashrithgn.example.proxyApp;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.retry.annotation.EnableRetry;
@SpringBootApplication
@EnableRetry
public class ProxyAppApplication {
public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(ProxyAppApplication.class, args);
}
}
POM for reference
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<parent>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
<version>2.6.1</version>
<relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
</parent>
<groupId>com.ashrithgn.example</groupId>
<artifactId>proxyApp</artifactId>
<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
<name>proxyApp</name>
<description>Demo project for Spring Boot</description>
<properties>
<java.version>17</java.version>
</properties>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.retry</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-retry</artifactId>
<version>1.2.5.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-aspects</artifactId>
<version>5.2.8.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
</project>