Proxy Transport Settings

The proxy section outlines the API proxying functionality. You can define where Tyk should listen, and where Tyk should proxy traffic to.

proxy.preserve_host_header

Set to true to preserve the host header. If proxy.preserve_host_header is set to true in an API definition then the host header in the outbound request is retained to be the inbound hostname of the proxy.

proxy.listen_path

The path to listen on, e.g. /api or /. Any requests coming into the host, on the port that Tyk is configured to run on, that go to this path will have the rules defined in the API Definition applied. Versioning assumes that different versions of an API will live on the same URL structure. If you are using URL-based versioning (e.g. /v1/function, /v2/function/) then it is recommended to set up a separate non-versioned definition for each version as they are essentially separate APIs.

Proxied requests are literal, no re-writing takes place, for example, if a request is sent to the listen path of: /listen-path/widgets/new and the URL to proxy to is http://your.api.com/api/ then the actual request that will land at your service will be: http://your.api.com/api/listen-path/widgets/new.

This behaviour can be circumvented so that the listen_path is stripped from the outgoing request. See the section on strip_listen_path below.

proxy.target_url

This defines the target URL that the request should be proxied to if it passes all checks in Tyk.

proxy.strip_listen_path

By setting this to true, Tyk will attempt to replace the listen-path in the outgoing request with an empty string. This means that in the above scenario where /listen-path/widgets/new and the URL to proxy to is http://your.api.com/api/ becomes http://your.api.com/api/listen-path/widgets/new, actually changes the outgoing request to be: http://your.api.com/api/widgets/new.

proxy.enable_load_balancing

Set this value to true to have a Tyk node distribute traffic across a list of servers. **Required: ** You must fill in the target_list section.

proxy.target_list

A list of upstream targets (can be one or many hosts).

proxy.check_host_against_uptime_tests

If uptime tests are enabled, Tyk will check the hostname of the outbound request against the downtime list generated by the host checker. If the host is found, then it is skipped.

proxy.service_discovery

The service discovery section tells Tyk where to find information about the host to proxy to. In a clustered environment this is useful if servers are coming online and offline dynamically with new IP addresses. The service discovery module can pull out the required host data from any service discovery tool that exposes a RESTful endpoint that outputs a JSON object.

{
  "enable_load_balancing": true,
  "service_discovery": {
    "use_discovery_service": true,
    "query_endpoint": "http://127.0.0.1:4001/v2/keys/services/multiobj",
    "use_nested_query": true,
    "parent_data_path": "node.value",
    "data_path": "array.hostname",
    "port_data_path": "array.port",
    "use_target_list": true,
    "cache_timeout": 10
  },
}

proxy.service_discovery.use_discovery_service

Set this to true to enable the discovery module.

proxy.service_discovery.query_endpoint

The endpoint to call.

proxy.service_discovery.data_path

The namespace of the data path. For example, if your service responds with:

{
  "action": "get",
  "node": {
    "key": "/services/single",
    "value": "http://httpbin.org:6000",
    "modifiedIndex": 6,
    "createdIndex": 6
  }
}

Then your name space would be node.value.

proxy.service_discovery.use_nested_query

Sometimes the data you are retrieving is nested in another JSON object. For example, this is how Etcd responds with a JSON object as a value key:

{
  "action": "get",
  "node": {
    "key": "/services/single",
    "value": "{\"hostname\": \"http://httpbin.org\", \"port\": \"80\"}",
    "modifiedIndex": 6,
    "createdIndex": 6
  }
}

In this case, the data actually lives within this string-encoded JSON object. So in this case, you set the use_nested_query to true, and use a combination of the data_path and parent_data_path (below)

proxy.service_discovery.parent_data_path

This is the namespace of where to find the nested value In the above example, it would be node.value.

You would then change the data_path setting to be hostname.

Tyk will decode the JSON string and then apply the data_path namespace to that object in order to find the value.

proxy.service_discovery.port_data_path

In the above nested example, we can see that there is a separate PORT value for the service in the nested JSON. In this case you can set the port_data_path value and Tyk will treat data_path as the hostname and zip them together (this assumes that the hostname element does not end in a slash or resource identifier such as /widgets/).

In the above example, the port_data_path would be port.

proxy.service_discovery.target_path

The target path to append to the host:port combination provided by the service discovery engine.

proxy.service_discovery.use_target_list

If you are using load_balancing, set this value to true and Tyk will treat the data path as a list and inject it into the target list of your API definition.

proxy.service_discovery.cache_timeout

Tyk caches target data from a discovery service. In order to make this dynamic you can set a cache value when the data expires and new data is loaded.

proxy.disable_strip_slash

This boolean option allows you to add a way to disable the stripping of the slash suffix from a URL.

Internal proxy setup

The transport section allows you to specify a custom proxy and set the minimum TLS versions and any SSL ciphers.

This is an example of proxy.transport definition followed by explanations for every field.

{
  "transport": {
    "proxy_url": "http(s)://proxy.url:1234",
    "ssl_min_version": 771,
    "ssl_ciphers": [
      "TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256", 
      "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA"
    ],
    "ssl_insecure_skip_verify": true,
    "ssl_force_common_name_check": false
  }
}

proxy.transport.proxy_url

Use this setting to specify your custom forward proxy and port.

proxy.transport.ssl_min_version

Use this setting to specify your minimum TLS version:

  You need to use the following values for this setting:

proxy.transport.ssl_ciphers

You can add ssl_ciphers which takes an array of strings as its value. Each string must be one of the allowed cipher suites as defined at https://golang.org/pkg/crypto/tls/#pkg-constants

proxy.transport.ssl_insecure_skip_verify

Boolean flag to control at the API definition whether it is possible to use self-signed certs for some APIs, and actual certs for others. This also works for TykMakeHttpRequest & TykMakeBatchRequest in virtual endpoints.

proxy.transport.ssl_force_common_name_check

Use this setting to force the validation of a hostname against the certificate Common Name.