Overview

A quick example of using NGINX as an independent sidecar proxy in front of your APIs hosted on OpenShift

Usage

This example requires access to Iron Bank, DoD Centralized Artifacts Repository (DCAR), which hosts a trial NGINX Plus image for the advanced usage example below.

Prerequisites:

git clone https://github.com/liveaverage/openshift-nginx-sidecar.git
cd openshift-nginx-sidecar/

oc new-project sidecar

# Establish a pull secret for accessing Iron Bank
oc create secret docker-registry external-registry --docker-username=<your_username> --docker-password=<your_harbor_key> --docker-server=registry1.dso.mil
oc secrets link default external-registry --for=pull

Initial Deployment:

oc create configmap nginx --from-file=default.conf=nginx-sidecar-proxy.conf
oc create configmap jwk --from-file=api_secret.jwk=nginx-sidecar-api.jwk
oc apply -f nginx-sidecar-deployment.yaml 

Expose the NGINX service using OpenShift Router:

oc expose deployment sidecar --port=8080
oc expose service sidecar
export ROUTE=`oc get route sidecar --template={{.spec.host}}`

Updates:

# Recreate the NGINX configuration
oc delete cm nginx; oc create configmap nginx --from-file=default.conf=nginx-sidecar-proxy.conf

# Redeploy httpbin and your sidecar
oc scale deployment/sidecar --replicas=0; sleep 8; oc scale deployment/sidecar --replicas=1; sleep 3; oc get pods -o wide

# Access httpbin
echo "httpbin available at: http://${ROUTE}"

# Smoke test
curl -X GET "http://${ROUTE}/get" -H  "accept: application/json" -v

Advanced Usage

NOTE: Use of JWT Authentication requires an NGINX Plus Release R10 or higher

Using JWT as an API key, based on the example here: https://www.nginx.com/blog/authenticating-api-clients-jwt-nginx-plus/

# Recreate NGINX configuration and secure location /get
oc delete cm nginx; oc create configmap nginx --from-file=default.conf=nginx-sidecar-proxy-jwt.conf

# Redeploy httpbin and your sidecar
oc scale deployment/sidecar --replicas=0; sleep 8; oc scale deployment/sidecar --replicas=1; sleep 3; oc get pods -o wide

Test authentication:

## Test without JWT; confirm response 401 denial:
curl -X GET "http://${ROUTE}/get" -H  "accept: application/json" -v

## Test with JWT; confirm response 200:
curl -X GET "http://${ROUTE}/get" -H  "accept: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer `cat nginx-sidecar.jwt`" -v