submergence v0.0.2
submergence
Client authentication and messaging backplane service API.
The state of the art in realtime, and particularly in peer to peer, is that even with the best shims easy jobs never are. "Room"-based libraries make lovely tutorials and demos but the leap from these barely-functional user experiences to a usable, scalable social application is too complex for anyone but the top competitive voip companies to manage.
The goal of substation
is to bridge that gap by reversing signal flow. A user logged in to your
application no longer has to ask to be reachable, they are reachable by identity as soon as their
Socket.io connection becomes active. Connection multiplicity is embraced by shipping events to
groups of related useragents (usually multiple tabs). Robust WebRTC peer "Links" are provided that
automatically connect and reconnect new connections to the Link as long as both peers maintain at
least one connection to the server.
Whether your application is a game server, a social application, a collaborative editing tool, a
telecom service or something totally novel to Planet Earth, substation
aims to support your
signaling requirements, at scale, out of the box.
Deployment
A MongoDB cluster is required for storing session and live connection metadata.
substation
runs on Node.js and installs with npm.
It is configured and launched from a parent script and does not have a CLI tool. A simple, robust,
cross-platform way to keep your server running is to launch it with forever.
npm install --save substation
npm install -g forever
forever myApp.js
Like most webapp servers, substation
must live behind a gateway server for load-balancing. The
load balancer must be "sticky" - a frequent stream of requests from the same agent must be routed to
the same service node. This is a requirement of Socket.io. substation
also currently expects the
load-balancer to terminate ssl
connections.
The recommended load balancer for substation
is nginx. Your configuration
should contain something like this:
upstream myapp {
ip_hash;
server alfa.myapp.com;
server sierra.myapp.com;
server hotel.myapp.com;
}
server {
Listen 443 ssl;
server_name myapp.com;
ssl_certificate myapp.com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key myapp.com.key;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_pass http://myapp/;
}
location /static {
root www/myapp;
}
}
Application Notes
Vital information relating to the deployment of a submergence
environment.
###Proxy Settings
The recommended proxy is nginx
.
- "sticky load balancing" must be used.
- The http header "Host" must be overwritten. Do not trust a client's headers!
###Database Setup
submergence
relies on MongoDB
and is designed to scale by sharding.
9 years ago