aleph-proxy

1. Introduction

Load balancer for the Aleph.im decentralized infrastructure.

This software provides an HTTPS endpoint to the capabilities of Core Channel (CCN) and Compute Resource (CRN) nodes of the network.

High availability is provided using DNS Failover: multiple servers are ready to handle client requests.

Requests are dispatched across the nodes of the network. Session cookies allow clients to request all their calls to be handled by the same Compute Resource Node and VM.

Use aleph.cloud instead of api1.aleph.im or api2.aleph.im to use the official load balancer, or install your own with the procedure below.

Use official.aleph.cloud to only query official nodes managed by Aleph.im.

2. Architecture

The aleph-proxy load balancer is based on the Traefik Proxy.

The configuration of the proxy is provided to Traefik by the aleph_proxy_config Python ASGI web application. It is based on ./aleph_proxy_config/config.yaml.

The nodes behind the load balancer are fetched from the Aleph.im nodes aggregate, the same data used in account.aleph.im. A health check ensures that requests are only forwarded to online nodes. If a node fails to respond, the request will be automatically forwarded to another node instead.

3. Installation

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install git docker-compose
usermod -aG docker debian
git clone https://github.com/aleph-im/aleph-proxy.git

Edit the hostnames in aleph-proxy/aleph_proxy_config/config.yaml.

Logout and login again.

cd aleph-proxy
docker-compose up -d

Copying keys

High availability setups will probably require you to copy the Let's Encrypt keys from a server to another.

If you do so, do not forget to update the file permissions on the second server:

chmod 600 ./letsencrypt/acme.json