powerbox-http-proxy is a daemon that is sometimes helpful for porting legacy applications that want HTTP access to Sandstorm. It acts as an HTTP proxy, and makes powerbox requests on-demand for domains that the legacy application tries to access. It is used by the Tiny Tiny RSS Port

Building

Install a recent Go toolchain and run:

go build

This will create an executable powerbox-http-proxy.

Configuration

To use powerbox-http-proxy with your application, you need to do the following:

• Build the daemon, per the above instructions.
• Add a <script> tag to your pages which includes powerbox-http-proxy.js (from the root of this repository).
• Arrange for the url /_sandstorm/websocket to be served by the daemon; see below.
• Arrange for your application to trust a root TLS cert generated by the daemon; this is necessary to proxy HTTPS requests.

The daemon is mainly configured through environment variables:

• POWERBOX_PROXY_PORT specifies the port that the daemon should listen on for proxy requests; you should configure your application to use http://localhost:$POWERBOX_PROXY_PORT as its proxy for both http and https. Many applications will observe the variables http_proxy and https_proxy, so you can often make this happen by just defining those variables.

• POWERBOX_WEBSOCKET_PORT specifies the port to listen on for connections from the JavaScript helper. You will want to configure your web server to point requests to /_sandstorm/websocket to this port. For example, for nginx, assuming POWERBOX_WEBSOCKET_PORT is 3000, you can use:

  location /_sandstorm/websocket {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
  }

• CA_CERT_PATH is the path to which the daemon should write its root certificate. Configure your application to trust the cert written to this location.

• DB_TYPE: The type of the database to use. Supported values are:

  • mysql for MySQL/MariaDB
  • sqlite3 for SQLite.

• DB_URI: The location of a mysql database in which to store the daemon's private data. The format depends on the value of DB_TYPE.

  • For SQLite, this should be the path to the database file.
  • For MySQL, see https://github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql#dsn-data-source-name for a description of the format.