It’s often useful to be able to interact with remote services or resources (e.g. databases) during local development. However, access to those remote services is often rightly restricted to traffic coming from the application itself, rather than from the internet.

In these cases, convox proxy and convox resources proxy can help by proxying traffic from your local development machine to your app’s services via your Rack.

Access external resources

When possible, resources are generally configured so they are not accessible from the public internet. You can get proxy access with the convox resources proxy command, e.g.:

$ convox resources proxy mysql-4624

Under the hood, this creates an encrypted and secure websocket tunnel through your Rack process that talks to your database via a socket on your local machine. In other words, convox resources proxy allows you to communicate with your Postgres database (for example) as if it were running on your own machine.

Example

In our Flask example repo, we’ve created a counter service and replaced the redis service with a redis resource (referred to here as redis-9990).

We can’t connect directly to our redis resource because it’s inside our app’s VPC and only accepts internal requests:

$ redis-cli -h lerabcdefghi.jklm5o.ng.0001.use1.cache.amazonaws.com:6379
Could not connect to Redis at lerabcdefghi.jklm5o.ng.0001.use1.cache.amazonaws.com:6379: Connection timed out

The manual way to interact with the redis resource would be to use convox exec to get a shell in the counter container and install redis-cli there, but this is neither efficient nor recommended.

convox resources proxy makes it much easier. In a terminal, run:

$ convox resources proxy redis-9990
proxying 127.0.0.1:6379 to lerabcdefghi.jklm5o.ng.0001.use1.cache.amazonaws.com:6379

Then, in another terminal on your local machine, run:

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379>

You’ll see connect: 6379 appear in the terminal where you ran convox resources proxy as evidence of your connection.

Now you can indirect with your remote redis resource:

127.0.0.1:6379> ping "hello world"
"hello world"

Access private services with convox proxy

convox proxy works much the same way as convox resources proxy except for internal services (i.e. exposed behind an internal ELB inside a VPC) rather than external resources.

Example

Let’s say we want to proxy from port 8000 on our local machine to port 80 of the counter service in our example repo:

First get the service endpoint by running convox apps info:

$ convox apps info
Name       flask
Status     running
Release    RTYQLLNIUTZ
Processes  counter redis
Endpoints  flask-counter-NJS6JDQ-842041791.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com:80 (counter)
           flask-counter-NJS6JDQ-842041791.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com:443 (counter)

Then choose a port on your local machine (8000 in our case), then run the convox proxy command in a terminal:

$ convox proxy 8000:flask-counter-NJS6JDQ-842041791.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com:80
proxying 127.0.0.1:8000 to flask-counter-NJS6JDQ-842041791.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com:80

In another terminal, run curl localhost:8000:

$ curl -s localhost:8000 | grep served
        <h2>This request was served by 3d511a719fc7.</h2>
        <h2>3d511a719fc7 served 7 requests so far.</h2>
        <h2>A grand total of 7 requests were served.</h2>

The page is returned as if it were being served from localhost.

See also

• Debugging
• Running locally