Proxy routes

Sometimes you want your app to pass requests on to a different Upsun project. Basic redirects only work within the same project, so use proxy routes for routes elsewhere.

You can define an external proxy on your Upsun project by defining a route like the following:

routes:
  https://{default}/foo:
    type: proxy
    to: https://www.example.com

This route passes requests for https://{default}/foo/index.html to https://www.example.com/foo/index.html.

You can also define a proxy route to an URL composed of an IP address and a port:

routes:
  https://{default}/foo:
    type: proxy
    to: https://192.0.2.0:8000

URL paths

In the basic example above, the route preserves the URL path, /foo, in the request.

If you want to proxy a route to https://www.example.com without the URL path /foo, add a trailing slash / to the to definition.

routes:
  https://{default}/foo:
    type: proxy
    to: https://www.example.com/

The trailing slash makes the proxy route interpret the location as having a different path. So requests for https://{default}/foo/index.html are forwarded to https://www.example.com/index.html.

To override the URL path entirely, define a route that contains its own path. For example:

routes:
  https://{default}/foo:
    type: proxy
    to: https://www.example.com/bar

This route passes requests for https://{default}/foo/index.html to https://www.example.com/bar/index.html.

Multiple apps with the same base URL

You can use proxy routes to map a single domain to multiple Upsun projects with their own subdomain/domain names. You might have a need to access multiple projects, each hosting specific applications for different languages. You want to serve them all at the same base URL with different paths (https://example.com/en, https://example.com/fr, and so on).

Because domains can’t be reused at Upsun, you can’t just set the same domain for all projects. Use proxy routes so a single project can access different projects using the same base URL.

In the following example, a single project specifies proxy routes to three apps with the same default base URL. Each app handles a different language.

routes:
  https://{default}/en:
    type: proxy
    to: https://en.example.com/

  https://{default}/jp:
    type: proxy
    to: https://jp.example.com/

  https://{default}/pt:
    type: proxy
    to: https://pt.example.com/

The apps behind the proxy need to ensure links to assets are shown to the target domain. For example, by changing https://en.example.com/style.css to https://example.com/en/style.css.

The following diagram shows the example project forwarding specific requests to the correct app.

Large projects

This architecture makes the router of a single project into the central element of your app. This setup may make scaling more difficult as the router scales with the size of that project. The router can become a bottleneck for all external sites and acts as a single point of failure.

For larger projects, you should handle multiple websites with the same base URL via a CDN.