Rust Reverse Proxy

A high-performance reverse proxy implementation in Rust, designed as a learning project to understand Rust's systems programming capabilities and network programming features.

What is a Reverse Proxy?

A reverse proxy is a server that sits between client devices and a web server, forwarding client requests to the appropriate backend server. It provides benefits like load balancing, SSL termination, caching, and security.

Features to Implement

Phase 1: Basic Proxy Implementation

• Basic HTTP request forwarding
• Simple configuration system for backend servers
• Request/Response handling
• Error handling and logging

Phase 2: Advanced Features

• Load balancing (Round-robin algorithm)
• Health checks for backend servers
• Basic caching mechanism
• Request/Response headers modification
• SSL/TLS termination

Phase 3: Performance & Monitoring

• Connection pooling
• Metrics collection (requests/second, response times)
• Async I/O operations
• Basic admin dashboard for monitoring

Phase 4: Security & Additional Features

• Rate limiting
• Basic authentication
• IP whitelisting/blacklisting
• Request filtering
• Compression support

Technical Learning Goals

1. Rust's ownership and borrowing system
2. Async programming with Tokio
3. Error handling with Result and Option
4. Networking concepts in Rust
5. Configuration management
6. Logging and metrics
7. Testing in Rust

Project Structure

reverseProxy/
├── src/
│   ├── main.rs           # Application entry point
│   ├── config/           # Configuration handling
│   ├── proxy/            # Core proxy logic
│   ├── balancer/         # Load balancing logic
│   ├── cache/            # Caching implementation
│   ├── health/           # Health checking
│   └── metrics/          # Metrics collection
├── tests/                # Integration tests
├── Cargo.toml           # Dependencies and metadata
└── README.md            # Project documentation

Implementation Steps

1. Project Setup

   • Initialize project structure
   • Set up basic dependencies
   • Create configuration structure

2. Basic Proxy Implementation

   • Implement basic TCP listener
   • Create HTTP request parser
   • Set up connection forwarding
   • Implement response handling

3. Configuration System

   • Create configuration file format
   • Implement configuration loading
   • Add backend server management

4. Load Balancing

   • Implement round-robin algorithm
   • Add backend server pool
   • Create health check system

5. Performance Features

   • Add connection pooling
   • Implement caching system
   • Set up metrics collection

6. Security Features

   • Add rate limiting
   • Implement authentication
   • Set up request filtering

Getting Started

(To be added as we progress with implementation)

Dependencies

• tokio (async runtime)
• hyper (HTTP implementation)
• config (configuration management)
• serde (serialization/deserialization)
• log (logging)
• metrics (monitoring)