Given you’re a professional website designer and would like to work on some wonderful project. This project might be about designing a new website with a blog and a shop for one of your favourite customers. To get involved in this project, she asked you to design a mock-up with your ideas first and send it to her. In this article I’m going to show you how you can give away your mock-up in an easy manner without setting up a full-blown web server stack.
You can find quite a few IT infrastructures where an HTTP proxy is used to secure the access to the “World Wide Web” (WWW). In smaller company environments you can configure the proxy for each workstation manually. In larger environments you normally use a so called “proxy.pac” for this. This article gives you an introduction to “proxy.pac”-files.
Given you have two different customers which need to access the same resource. The URL should be the same for both, e.g. “https://www.example.org/resource.db”, but the response should be different. From “2.4” on the apache httpd can make use of its expressions in its rewrite engine. There’s an expression -R which does the “same as %{REMOTE_ADDR} -ipmatch ..., but more efficient” which matches the IP address of a requesting client to an IP network.
Some of my rubygems – e.g. proxy_pac_rb – either need a backing HTTP(S)-server for their tests or interact with some external web services via HTTP/HTTPS. To mock external services you can either use VCR, webmock or just plain Webrick. To serve data for your tests via HTTP(S), you can use Webrick as well. As Webrick is part of ruby core and is sufficient for both use cases, this article only describes ways to run a Webrick-HTTP(S)-server to back your test suite.
Do you know what: It’s that simple to setup an HTTP forwarding proxy (proxy) with ruby. The only thing you need is webrick’s HTTPProxyServer-class. If you don’t know what a proxy is, please have a look at this article on Wikipedia. In brief: An HTTP proxy is an intermediary server. It is located between the HTTP client and the HTTP server. Using this kind of architecture makes it easier to do virus scanning etc. of web traffic.
