hunchentoot-multi-acceptor

Arnold Noronha arnold@jipr.io

Typically each hunchentoot acceptor listens on a single port, and typically serves a single domain. A typical configuration is to have a frontend webserver like Nginx to route requests to the appropriate port.

This is hard to manage when the number of domains keep increasing (which is typical for small companies trying to iterate on different products). hunchentoot-multi-acceptor simplifies the configurations of such systems.

Installation

As an example, I personally run tdrhq.com (my personal website) and jipr.io (a project I'm working on.) These have two different hunchentoot acceptors:

(defvar *tdrhq-acceptor* (make-instance 'hunchentoot:easy-acceptor
                                         :port nil
                                         :name 'tdrhq))

(defvar *jipr-acceptor*
  (make-instance 'hunchentoot:easy-acceptor
                 :port nil
                 :name 'jipr))

These definitions could be in different packages and systems, it doesn't matter. Also the :port argument is useful when developing locally and want to test only one of the websites, but it won't be used by multi-acceptor.

Now, we have a multi-acceptor setup as follows:

(defparameter *multi-acceptor* (make-instance 'hunchentoot-multi-acceptor:multi-acceptor :port 4001 :name 'multi-acceptor))
(hunchentoot-multi-acceptor:add-acceptor *multi-acceptor* "tdrhq.com" *tdrhq-acceptor*)
(hunchentoot-multi-acceptor:add-acceptor *multi-acceptor* "www.jipr.io" *jipr-acceptor*)

(hunchentoot:start *multi-acceptor*)

At this point, you can configure your Nginx frontend for both websites to point to localhost:4001. Make sure the "Host" header is appropriately set. (proxy_set_header Host $host:$server_port). After that hunchentoot-multi-acceptor will take care of routing to the appropriate acceptor. Only one port will be opened.

License

Apache License, Version 2.0