overview/overview-proxy repository overview

⁠Overview Proxy

Exposes Overview's web server and plugins on localhost -- and optionally through SSL to the world.

⁠Usage

This image is made to be run by overview-local⁠. Here's what overview-local does:

1. overview-local starts a bunch of Docker-container HTTP servers: overview-web, overview-plugin-word-cloud, etc.
2. overview-local will maybe set the OV_DOMAIN_NAME environment variable.
3. overview-local starts overview-proxy within the same network. Manually, the command might be: docker run --network overviewlocal_default --volumes overview-acme:/var/lib/acme -P --rm overview/overview-proxy

overview-proxy will listen on several ports:

• HTTP requests on ports 9000 and 3000-3005: forwarded to overview-web and plugin containers, chosen by port. For instance, port 3000 is forwarded to overview-plugin-word-cloud.
• HTTP requests on port 443: forwarded to overview-web and plugin containers, chosen by SSL SNI⁠ (domain name).
• HTTP requests on port 80: these redirect to HTTPS. (Port 80 is used to generate SSL keys.)

⁠Easy, Free SSL

By default, overview-proxy won't handle SSL requests: you'll only be able to access http://localhost:9000 (overview-web), http://localhost:3000 (overview-plugin-word-cloud), and so forth. Requests on ports 80 and 443 will fail.

If you set an environment variable OV_DOMAIN_NAME, though, things change. Assuming you set it to overview.example.com, overview-proxy will go through several steps while the proxy is started.

Run docker logs -f overview-proxy to see its progress through the steps.

1. You need to create a DNS A, AAAA or CNAME record for overview.example.com, pointing somewhere you control. overview-proxy will look up the address every few seconds until you do.
2. You need packets routed from the Internet to overview.example.com:80 to reach your overview-proxy container on port 80 and overview.example.com:443 to reach your overview-proxy container on port 443. (You may need to administer both your Internet router and the computer you're running Docker on.) Every few seconds, overview-proxy will try to generate an SSL certificate using Let's Encrypt until networking is working.
3. overview-proxy will start accepting SSL requests for overview.example.com.
4. Now add DNS entries for plugins. They should all point to the same IP address. The overview-proxy logs will show you your progress. overview-plugin-word-cloud.example.com, overview-plugin-multi-search.example.com, overview-plugin-entity-filter.example.com, overview-plugin-metadata.example.com, and overview-plugin-file-browser.example.com. (We add "-plugin-word-cloud" before the first dot in OV_DOMAIN_NAME.)

Daily, overview-proxy will renew SSL certificates that are nearly expired.