Keter updates

It's been a while since I wrote a post about the status of Keter, and there have been a number of important changes and feature additions in the past few months. This post should fill in some gaps.

For those of you not familiar with it, Keter is a web application deployment manager. You package up your executable, static resources, and a config file, and Keter will:

• Run and monitor your server process.
• Assign a port number to your app.
• Handle virtual hosting to route requests to the right app.
• Start running new versions of your app as they are providing, and atomically switch which app is proxied to.

The Keter README file has full instructions on getting up-and-running with Keter, and the code itself can be installed from Hackage. To get up-and-running quickly on Ubuntu-based systems, you can run:

wget -O - https://raw.github.com/snoyberg/keter/master/setup-keter.sh | bash -ex

Keter is designed to work with any web application, the only requirement is that the app answer HTTP requests on the PORT environment variable provided to it. It is completely agnostic to your choice of development language and toolset.

As far as notable features added in the past few months:

• Removed Nginx dependency. Keter itself provides its own reverse proxying system via http-reverse-proxy. It uses that package's raw proxy system, which is able to get by with a substantially reduced overhead versus a full-blown proxy server.

  Moving away from Nginx has simplified the deployment process, and according to user reports improved response times. (Note: I have not performed any significant benchmarking to back that up, the reports are anecdotal.)

• Using Vincent Hanquez's tls package and the network-conduit-tls wrapper, Keter now fully supports secure connections. In practice, you can really only have one secure domain per site (due to the normal restriction of needing a separate IP address per SSL host). The README file shows how to configure this setup.

• An application can listen on multiple hosts at the same time. It will still maintain a single canonical host for setting the APPROOT environment variable.

• Static file hosting is built-in. Each application can define zero or more host-folder mappings. Under the surface, this uses Warp and wai-app-static, providing efficient file serving and caching features out of the box.

• Hostname redirects are built in. The main use case for this is automatically redirecting from mysite.com to www.mysite.com (or the reverse, if you prefer that).

• setuid support built-in. If you set a setuid value in the config file, all processes will be run as that user and project files owned by that user.

Keter is being used in the wild in a number of places, including this site. The Keter instance is actually hosting four different applications, all on an Amazon EC2 micro instance, so the overhead is not very high. If you're looking for a tool to simplify deployment of your web applications, try Keter.