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Install Haproxy On Windows

Java for os x 10.8. This is a video from the Scaling Laravel course's Load Balancing module.

  1. HAProxy Download and Install ^ The HAProxy appliance is available to download as a VMware vSphere OVA file. It makes the process of deploying the device straightforward and intuitive for vSphere administrators. You can download the latest version of the HAProxy appliance from the official Github releases page.
  2. Install and Start HAProxy. Install the haproxy package with following command: sudo apt-get -y install haproxy After installation, verify that HAProxy is working: haproxy -v The server will respond with: HA-Proxy version 1.6.3 2015/12/25 Copyright 2000-2015 Willy Tarreau You can also find created files in the following locations.
  3. Haproxy package is available in the default package repositories of CentOS 8 and RHEL 8, so it can be easily installed with dnf command. But it is recommended update your system before installing haproxy. So execute the following command, root@haproxy-centos8 # dnf update -y root@haproxy-centos8 # reboot.
  4. For example you can run haproxy on a VM inside a Windows host under Hyper-V, if you're that much into Windows. But in reality I would not either, because this makes you dependant on the Windows IP stack, and I doubt anyone would want this in a production when he has other choices, especially when said stack has bugs like this.

Haproxy for windows (it is very easier to transfer others server) QuickStart(use quiet mode) haproxy.exe -f config.json -q These 3 files is required for running haproxy.exe cyggccs-1.dll cygwin1.dll.

Part of what I wanted to cover was how to use SSL certificates with a HAProxy load balancer. LetsEncrypt (certbot) is great for this, since we can get a free and trusted SSL certificate. Since we're using LetsEncrypt on a load balancer (HAProxy) which cannot serve the authorization HTTP requests that LetsEncrypt makes, we have some unique issues to get around. Let's see how!

Install LetsEncrypt

Let's get some boilerplate out of the way. Here's how I install LetsEncrypt (Certbot) on Ubuntu 16.04:

As the video shows, this installer creates a CRON task (/etc/cron.d/certbot) to request a renewal twice a day. The certificate only gets renewed if it's under 30 days from expiration. Checking twice a day is a relatively safe way to check and get around potential timing bugs. This default is very handy for a typical installation.

However, since we have some unique needs with HAProxy, we'll use a slightly different CRON task for this use case.

The Problems

The first hurdle to get around arises because LetsEncrypt authorizes a certificate for a server by requesting a file via an HTTP(S) request. However, HAProxy is not a web server. It won't serve files by itself - it will only redirect a request to another location. Our application servers won't be able to handle this authorization request.

Since we want our SSL certificate on the load balancer (SSL Termination), our goal is to find a way to have HAProxy recognize a request from LetsEncrypt and route it to a web service that will respond with the response LetsEncrypt needs to authorize the certificate.

LetsEncrypt comes with it's own built-in web server listener for just such a use case, so we can accomplish this!

The second hurdle is that HAProxy expects an SSL certificate to all be in one file which includes the certificate chain, the root certificate, and the private key. HAProxy has the private key in a separate file, so our last step is to combine the files into something HAProxy can read.

Finally we'll also solve the issue of automating renewals given the above constraints.

The Workflow

There are two actions we ask of LetsEncrypt:

  1. Request a new certificate
  2. Renew an existing certificate
Haproxy

After each step above, we also need to combine the resulting certificate files into the format HAProxy wants.

Haproxy Download

Let's see those two scenarios, and then see how to combine the certificate into one file.

HAProxy Setup

When we request a new certificate, LetsEncrypt will request the authorization file (a URI like /.well-known/acme-challenge/random-hash-here). This request will happen over port 80, since there's presumably no certificate setup yet.

Interestingly, if HAProxy is listening on port 443, LetsEncrypt may attempt to authorize over it. So, when we create a new certificate, we need HAProxy to only be listening on port 80.

Another issue: HAProxy is listening on port 80. However, we need LetsEncrypt to setup it's stand-alone server to listen for authorization requests. It will default to port 80 as well, causing a conflict as only one process can listen on a port at a time. So we need to tell LetsEncrypt to listen on another port!

Within HAProxy, we can ask if the incoming HTTP request contains the string /.well-known/acme-challenge. In the coniguration below, if HAProxy sees that the request does include that URI, it will route the request to LetsEncrypt. Otherwise, it will route the request to any servers in the load balancer rotation as normal.

Once that's setup within HAProxy, we can reload it (sudo service haproxy reload) and then move on to running LetsEncrypt.

New Certificates

The command to get a new certificate from LetsEncrypt that we will use is this:

/embird-2017-download.html. Lets roll through what this does:

  1. --standalone - Create a stand-alone web server to listen for the cert authorization HTTP request
  2. -d demo.scalinglaravel.com - The domain we're creating a cert for. You can use multiple -d flags for multiple domains for a single certificate. The domain(s) must route to the server we're creating a cert for (DNS must be setup for the domain).
  3. --non-interactive --agree-tos --email admin@example.com - Make this non-interactive by saying as much, agreeing to the TOS, and informing LetsEncrypt of the email to use to send 'YOUR CERT IS EXPIRING' notifications.
  4. --http-01-port=8888 - The Magic™. This tells the stand-alone server to listen on port 8888. Note that LetsEncrypt will still send the authorization HTTP request over port 80. However the listener is expecting a proxy (such as our HAProxy server) to route the request to it over port 8888. The flag is http-01 because it expects an HTTP request, NOT an HTTPS request.

Renewing Certificates

If we are renewing a certificate, that likely means that there's a valid HTTPS certificate in use. We just need LetsEncrypt to do the same process as above to renew it. However, there's a few key differences:

  1. HAProxy is presumably listening on port 443 for SSL connections, and LetsEncrypt is going to send an authorization request over HTTPS instead of HTTP.
  2. The stand-alone server will expect an HTTPS (TLS, technically) request into it instead of a plain HTTP request.

So, the HAProxy setup will be almost the same, except this time it will be listening on port 443.

We'll cover setting up the HAProxy configuration for SSL in a bit.

Note that LetsEncrypt's stand-alone server is still listening on port 8888, even though it's expecting a TLS connection. That's fine, the port number doesn't actually matter. The only change here is that HAProxy is listening for SSL connections as well.

Here's how to renew a certificate with LetsEncrypt:

Install Haproxy Windows

That's it! We use renew, but this time we tell it to expect a tls connection and to contune listening for in on port 8888 (again).

SSL Certificates and HAProxy

HAProxy needs an ssl-certificate to be one file, in a certain format. To do that, we create a new directory where the SSL certificate that HAProxy reads will live. Then we output the 'live' (latest) certificates from LetsEncrypt and dump that output into the certificate file for HAProxy to use:

The /etc/letsencrypt/live/your-domain-here.tld directory will contain symlinks to your current, most up-to-date certificate.

So, we make sure a directory exists for our certificate, and then we concatenate the contents of the fullchain.pem file (certificate and certificate chain) and the private key privkey.pem file. We put the outputs into the file demo.scalinglaravel.com.pem. The order we concatenate the files matter (fullchain followed by private key).

The HAProxy configuration, as we saw, uses that new file:

Automating Renewal

To automate renewal of our certificate, we need to repeat the above steps:

  1. Get a new certificate
  2. Create the new certificate file for HAProxy to use

By default, LetsEncrypt creates a CRON entry at /etc/cron.d/certbot. The entry runs twice a day (by default, LetsEncrypt will only renew the certificate if its expiring within 30 days).

What I like to do is to run a bash script that's run monthly, and to force a renewal of the certificate every time.

We can start by editing the CRON file to run a script monthly:

That runs on the zeroth minute of the zeroth hour (midnight on whatever timezone your server is set to, likely UTC) on the first day of every month.

The bash file referenced in the CRON task (/opt/update-certs.sh) looks like this:

This does all the steps we ran before. The only difference is that I use --force-renewal to have LetsEncrypt renew the certificate monthly. This way is a bit simpler to reason about and won't fall victim to potential timing bugs that running twice per day attempted to get around.

Enforcing HTTPS

This is not related to LetsEncrypt, but rather to your SSL implementation.

If you want to enforce SSL usage in HAProxy, you can also do that without affecing LetsEncrypt's ability to renew certificate:

This states that if the frontend connection was not using SSL, then return a 301 redirect to the same URI, but with 'https'.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, application-development tool enabling infrastructure as a code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management (allowing remote PowerShell execution) to do its tasks.

Advantages of Ansible:

  • Free: Ansible is an open-source tool.
  • Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks later).
  • Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows.
  • Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.
  • Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.
  • Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.

What is Load Balancer ?

Load balancing is defined as the methodical and efficient distribution of network or application traffic across multiple servers in a server farm. Each load balancer sits between client devices and backend servers, receiving and then distributing incoming requests to any available server capable of fulfilling them. Tubidy video downloader for android.

Problem Statement:

Use Ansible playbook to Configure Reverse Proxy i.e. Haproxy and update it's configuration file automatically on each time new Managed node (Configured With Apache Webserver) join the inventory.

Solution:

Before doing the task you have to download and configure the inventory of ansible. Type this command in your vm it will download the ansible for you. Check the ansible by typing ansible --version.

Now we have to make random name file in my case i make a file named /etc/myhosts.txt and write your other virtual machine IP and other things like root and password etc.

Acoording to above image ansible see its repository in /etc/ansible/ansible.conf file so configure this file.

See all the hosts by typing ansible all --list-hosts.

Ping to the host to see there is ssh connectivity between both the virtual machine or not.

Now I have created two roles one for webserver and one for load balancer. You can create roles by typing

webserver role:

Task:

lbserver role:

Task:

Handlers:

Template:

For see the complete role go to GitHub URL: https://github.com/Nishantsingh70/Arth_Ansible_Task12.1

Now we have write the ansible-playbook for configure web server on this aws instance.

Note: You have to give root power to ansible user before running this playbook.

Now check the syntax of the main playbook ansible-playbook --syntax-check set.yml and after that run this playbook by typing ansible-playbook set.yml. It will give the output like this.

Note: Initially I am using 2 Virtual Machine.

1st VM => Ansible Controller Node + Haproxy Server
2nd VM => Web Server

After running the playbook, I will check the configuration is done.

Controller Node (Haproxy Server) configuration:

Manage Node (Web Server)configuration:

Output when type the haproxy server IP.

Now I add one more IP (VM) in the Ansible Inventory file and this system work as a web server and haproxy server help us to manage the outside traffic.

Now I add my IP, user, password and connection details in /etc/myhosts.txt file.

See all the hosts by typing ansible all --list-hosts.

Ping to the host to see there is ssh connectivity between both the virtual machine or not.

Now check the syntax of the main playbook ansible-playbook --syntax-check set.yml and after that run this playbook by typing ansible-playbook set.yml. It will give the output like this.

Controller Node (Haproxy Server) configuration:

Note: haproxy software is already installed. Only need to check the haproxy.cfg file of it.

In the above image, In the last you can see that there are 2 web server IP.

Manage Node (Web Server of 2nd VM)configuration:

Final Output::

GitHub URL:

Thanks guys for reading this article.