alepharchives / mbrain Goto Github PK

Are you running Yaws as your web server and want to be able to run different Yaws backend nodes, either on the same Host or on different hosts?

Then mbrain may be the easy solution for you.

For example, on my server at home I'm running a number of experimental systems written in Erlang. Many of them have a web interface that I want to expose to the Internet. And I want them to be accessible as subdomains of MY.OWN.DOMAIN, on port 80.

The idea is very simple. On my server I will run only one Erlang node that runs Yaws. This is my web server. I configure Yaws to virt-host my systems, pointing the docroot's accordingly. Then for each backend system I make sure that every .yaws file only contains one single rpc-call to the actual backend system node. The result from the rpc-call must be consumable by the Yaws server. Typically, this means that I move any Yaws code into a corresponding Erlang module. So for example, if I have a login.yaws file, then I move the content of the file into an Erlang module named: login_yaws.erl. The only thing left in the login.yaws file is the following code:

out(Arg) -> mbrain:call(mynode, login_yaws, out, [Arg]).

The mbrain:call/4 function, which executes in the mbrain frontend server node, will check if there exist any other connected nodes that match mynode@HOST, and if so; make an rpc:call/4 to that node. If there are several node names that match, one of them is picked by random. It is also possible to specify a list of node names to the mbrain:call/4 to cater for the case where you want to load balance several nodes on the same host. Example:

out(Arg) -> mbrain:call([mynode1,mynode2], login_yaws, out, [Arg]).

This means that none of my systems anylonger need to run Yaws of their own. It also results in that no traditional rev-proxy work, a la nginx, is needed. And as the final touch; it also makes it possible to implement a simple form of load balancing.

The only thing that the backend node(s) need to do is to call the mbrain:ping() function (or mbrain:ping(Host) ). This will setup a connection to the mbrain node and a watcher process will be started that ensures that this connection will stay up.

Isn't Erlang wonderful :-)

--Tobbe