HAProxy is an open-source Linux tool that provides high availability load balancing and proxy services for TCP and HTTP-based network applications. Fue to its easy integration into existing architectures, suitability for high-traffic websites, extreme reliability, and focus on upwards compatibility, it is shipped by default by most mainstream Linux distros.<\/p>\n
One of the most basic yet useful features of HAProxy is its proxy service, which is the focus of this tutorial. The proxy service allows for server-side protection against client-side attacks or defects, transparent connections, server offloading, enforcement of policies, protocols, and timeouts, as well as the ability to limit connections in and out to particular namespaces. These abilities of HAProxy make it a powerful tool for any Ubuntu user.<\/p>\n
To complete this guide, you will need the following: Prepare Your System<\/strong><\/p>\n Before you can install HAProxy on your system, you must update your Ubuntu instance. First, execute the following command as root or using sudo to update your system with information about the latest versions of packages from the Ubuntu base repositories.<\/p>\n Next, you can update packages on your system with the information fetched above to get the latest releases of installed packages:<\/p>\n Setup HAProxy<\/strong> Because HAProxy is disabled initially, use the command sed to set HAProxy’s status to enabled:<\/p>\n Start up the HAProxy service:<\/p>\n HAProxy must be configured with basic information for ports to use in order to begin using its services. The configuration file located in \/etc\/haproxy\/haproxy.cfg has two sections, global, which sets process-wide parameters, and proxies, which consists of the defaults, listen, front-end, and back-end sections.<\/p>\n To begin configuration, open the configuration file with the text editor vi:<\/p>\n The default configuration file will look something like the following. The front-end defines how requests should be handled and sent to the backend server:<\/p>\n To add a listener on port 80 on localhost for our http proxy, add the following lines to the bottom of the configuration file. The port is configured with bind<\/em>:<\/p>\n Below is an example of a basic configuration file for HAProxy including two back-end servers (192.168.1.10 and 192.168.1.11) for HTTP and HTTPS. A back-end server is a machine that handles forwarded requests from the front-end and is defined by its servers and ports as well as which load algorithm to use.<\/p>\n For HTTPS, we must use the TCP mode unless the haproxy-devel package is installed, which allows https with ssl offloading and certificate configuration. Note that we also enable the “stats page” section to allow you to better monitor the status of each proxy port:<\/p>\n The basic configuration above will allow you to send traffic on port 80 and 443 of your two back-end web servers. Restart your HAProxy instance to activate the changes performed in the configuration file:<\/p>\n Confirm HAProxy is Running<\/strong><\/p>\n You can check the status quickly on the command line to see if HAProxy is currently running:<\/p>\n You can also visit the stats url we configured above to confirm that the ports are opened and traffic can flow through. Simply navigate to your proxy IP on port 9000. For example, go to http:\/\/localhost:9000<\/p>\n Enable your HAProxy instance to load on boot. Simply execute the following command:<\/p>\n You can also monitor the status of your proxy from the command line using HATOP. HATOP is a third-party application that extracts the statistics from a socket file created by HAProxy. Download the HATOP package and confirm with y for yes when prompted:<\/p>\n Normally when calling HATOP, you must use the -s parameter with the command sudo hatop -s \/var\/run\/haproxy.sock. To avoid having to enter the -s parameter when calling HATOP, you may insert the following line in your ~\/.bashrc file:<\/p>\n After completing this tutorial, you will have a running HAProxy-style proxy service that redirects requests to your desired back-end servers that you can monitor with HATOP. If this guide was helpful to you, kindly share it with others who may also be interested.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How to install HAProxy on Ubuntu 16 HAProxy is an open-source Linux tool that provides high availability load balancing and proxy services for TCP and HTTP-based network applications. Fue to its easy integration into existing architectures, suitability for high-traffic websites, extreme reliability, and focus on upwards compatibility, it is shipped by default by most mainstream<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ha-clustering"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n\u2022 1 Node (Cloud Server<\/b><\/a> or Dedicated Server<\/b><\/a>) running a clean installation of Ubuntu 16.
\n\u2022 All commands should be run as the root user or with sudo capabilities<\/p>\nsudo apt-get update<\/code><\/p>\nsudo apt-get upgrade<\/code><\/p>\n
\nHAProxy can be installed directly from Ubuntu’s provided package repositories using this command. Enter yes when prompted and wait for the installation to complete:<\/p>\nsudo apt-get install haproxy<\/code><\/p>\nsed -i \"s\/ENABLED=0\/ENABLED=1\/g\" \/etc\/default\/haproxy<\/code><\/p>\n\/etc\/init.d\/haproxy start<\/code><\/p>\nsudo vi \/etc\/haproxy\/haproxy.cfg<\/code><\/p>\n# This is an example of the default configuration file.
\nglobal
\nlog \/dev\/log daemon
\nmaxconn 32768
\nchroot \/var\/lib\/haproxy
\nuser haproxy
\ngroup haproxy
\ndaemon
\nstats socket \/run\/haproxy\/admin.sock mode 660 level admin<\/code><\/p>\ndefaults
\nlog global
\noption logs-health-checks
\noption log-separate-errors
\noption dontlog-normal
\noption socket-stats
\nretries 3
\nmaxconn 10000
\ntimeout connect 5s
\ntimeout client 50s
\ntimeout server 450s<\/code><\/p>\nfrontend my-http-frontend
\nbind :80
\nmode http
\ndefault_backend my-http-backend<\/code><\/p>\n# This is an example of the default configuration file that has been modified for two back-end servers and to use stats.
\nglobal
\nlog \/dev\/log daemon
\nmaxconn 32768
\nchroot \/var\/lib\/haproxy
\nuser haproxy
\ngroup haproxy
\ndaemon
\nstats socket \/run\/haproxy\/admin.sock mode 660 level admin<\/code><\/p>\ndefaults
\nlog global
\noption log-health-checks
\noption log-separate-errors
\noption dontlog-normal
\noption socket-stats
\nretries 3
\nmaxconn 10000
\ntimeout connect 5s
\ntimeout client 50s
\ntimeout server 450s<\/code><\/p>\nfrontend my-http-frontend
\nbind :80
\nmode http
\ndefault_backend my-http-backend<\/code><\/p>\nfrontend my-https-frontend
\nbind :443
\nmode tcp
\ndefault_backend my-https-backend<\/code><\/p>\nbackend my-http-backend
\nmode http
\nserver s1 192.168.1.10 check
\nserver s2 192.168.1.11 check<\/code><\/p>\nbackend my-https-backend
\nmode tcp
\nserver s1 192.168.1.10 check
\nserver s2 192.168.1.11 check<\/code><\/p>\nlisten stats
\nbind :9000
\nstats enable
\nstats hide-version
\nstats refresh 20s
\nstats show-node
\nstats uri \/stats<\/code><\/p>\n\/etc\/init.d\/haproxy restart<\/code><\/p>\nsudo service haproxy status<\/code><\/p>\nupdate-rc.d haproxy defaults<\/code><\/p>\nsudo apt-get install hatop<\/code><\/p>\nexport unix-socket=SOCKET<\/code><\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\n