Create an API Gateway Using NodeJS and Express
By: Bram Janssen
Tags: Express, Middleware, Nodejs, Marketplaces, Api Gateway

Let's say that you have a bunch of API endpoints that you are currently managing, such as a large collection of micro services. Maybe at some point, you would like to have a little bit more control over the requests that are routed towards your services but you really don't want to manage separately for every single micro service. This is where an API gateway could come in.

The goal of an API gateway is to provide an intermediate layer between the clients and your micro services. By introducing an API gateway, clients send their requests to the gateway which in its turn will make sure the request is redirected to the corresponding micro service. In doing so, the API gateway can execute additional checks and validation on the incoming requests, such as authentication checks, metrics collection, message validation, response transformation, rate limiting, …

In this post I want to show how you can create a very basic API gateway using NodeJS. Before starting with the implementation, let us first take a look at our use case. In this post, we will be implementing an API gateway that could be deployed within a marketplace infrastructure. The goal of this API gateway is to check incoming requests and make sure premium services can only be accessed by users that have sufficient credits in their account. If this is not the case, the request should be blocked from executing. Given the scenario, this would boil down to the following requirements:

All incoming requests should be redirected to one of the micro services.

Some routes will only allow authenticated requests, others can be access without a valid authentication (for example the documentation endpoints).

Rate limiting is required for our free-to-use services in order to reduce the load on our backends.

Premium services require the user to have credits in their accounts in order to execute the request.

Disclaimer — This post contains a way of creating a DYI API gateway using Express. In an enterprise setting, it is better to use dedicated tools and software for this. Some example packages are:

Prerequisites

In the code of this post we will be using Keycloak (https://www.keycloak.org/) to support user authorisation. There are many online resources available on how to setup a Keycloak environment. However, the code in this post can be re-used with any access and identity tool that supports integration with NodeJS. This means you can just replace the authentication part of the code to be compliant with your own system.

The Setup ✏️

First things first, we start with setting up the project and installing the right dependencies. For the base of our API gateway, we will be using an Express server. So let's start with setting up the project and installing Express. Do this by executing the following commands:

npm init

npm install express --save

Great! Now we can start setting up our basic Express server. Why not setting up a hello world endpoint to see if everything is working as we expected? As any respectable coder, we need to start with a hello world example… This means creating a file called server.js and adding the following code:

const express = require('express')



const app = express()

const port = 3000;





app.get('/hello', (req, resp) => {

return resp.send('HELLO WORLD!');

})



app.listen(port, () => {

console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`)

})

We can try out our server by running one of the following commands:

node server.js //or npm run start

The proof is in the pudding, so open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000/hello and TADA 🎉. You can now start your celebratory dance 💃

OK, time to step it up! The next steps of the implementation is to add different features to our server in order to create our API gateway.

The Logging 📓

The first feature we want to add is logging information about the incoming requests. This can be useful for debugging purposes but also to collect metrics about the requests processed by the API gateway.

In our case we will be using the morgan library (https://www.npmjs.com/package/morgan). Morgan allows us to extend our Express server with logging capabilities. Morgan also supports apache like logging with makes it easy to incorporate into existing logging collection frameworks such as ELK stacks.

Start by installing morgan in your existing NodeJS project:

npm install morgan --save

Next up we create a separate logging.js file to configure our logging settings and export them through a function.

const morgan = require("morgan");



const setupLogging = (app) => {

app.use(morgan('combined'));

}



exports.setupLogging = setupLogging

We can now include our function into the existing server.js in order to enable request logging:

const express = require('express')

const {setupLogging} = require("./logging");





const app = express()

const port = 3000;





setupLogging(app); app.get('/hello', (req, resp) => {

return resp.send('HELLO WORLD!');

}) app.listen(port, () => {

console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`)

})

If we now restart our server and refresh our browser, we can see that the request gets logged in the server's console.

The Config 🔑

Before we continue with integrating additional features, we will first create the configuration of the different routes we want to support in our API gateway. Each route can have multiple properties based on the features that should be enabled. How these properties are configured will be explained in the chapters dedicated to the different features.

In order to create configuration, create a new routes.js file with the following contents:

const ROUTES = [

{

url: '/free',

auth: false,

creditCheck: false,

rateLimit: {

windowMs: 15 * 60 * 1000,

max: 5

},

proxy: {

target: "https://www.google.com",

changeOrigin: true,

pathRewrite: {

[`^/free`]: '',

},

}

},

{

url: '/premium',

auth: true,

creditCheck: true,

proxy: {

target: "https://www.google.com",

changeOrigin: true,

pathRewrite: {

[`^/premium`]: '',

},

}

}

]



exports.ROUTES = ROUTES;

For the sake of simplicity, we have identified two routes, one that represents the endpoint of a free (/free) service and one representing a premium (/premium) service. Each service can have the following properties:

url — URL path to match with incoming requests. This can be any path that is supported by Express. This means it can also contain wildcards to match multiple paths.

— URL path to match with incoming requests. This can be any path that is supported by Express. This means it can also contain wildcards to match multiple paths. auth — Boolean representing if a user needs to be authenticated for accessing this endpoint.

— Boolean representing if a user needs to be authenticated for accessing this endpoint. creditCheck — Boolean indicating if a credit check needs to be executed for this request.

— Boolean indicating if a credit check needs to be executed for this request. rateLimit — Configuration for applying rate limiting to the service.

— Configuration for applying rate limiting to the service. proxy — Proxy configuration containing information about the target to which the request should be redirected

Proxy 📩

Next up we want to set up the proxy rules that should be applied to our incoming requests. This is an important feature as our API gateway will be responsible for redirecting incoming requests to actual micro services.

We can use an existing library called http-proxy-middleware (https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-proxy-middleware) to configure the different proxy rules for our routes. Install it by executing the following command:

npm install http-proxy-middleware --save

Next, we create a separate proxy.js file that will create the proxies for our routes. The content of this file goes as follows:

const { createProxyMiddleware } = require('http-proxy-middleware');



const setupProxies = (app, routes) => {

routes.forEach(r => {

app.use(r.url, createProxyMiddleware(r.proxy));

})

}



exports.setupProxies = setupProxies

As you may notice, there is not a lot happening here. The only thing this snippet does, is adding the createProxyMiddleware for each route in our configuration. And that is indeed all folks! The only thing we need to do is add the correct proxy configuration to our routes.js configuration file. You can use the documentation (https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-proxy-middleware) to look into the different options. If you are used to working with Angular, Apache or httpd configuration, you will notice many similarities.

The only thing left to do is to integrate the proxy configuration in our main server. This can be done by adding the following code to our server.js file:

const express = require('express')



const {ROUTES} = require("./routes");



const {setupLogging} = require("./logging");

const {setupProxies} = require("./proxy");



const app = express()

const port = 3000;





setupLogging(app);

setupProxies(app, ROUTES);



app.listen(port, () => {

console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`)

})

Notice that we have removed our hello world endpoint. We are now entering more advanced territory, so no need for a hello world anymore 😉

If we restart our server, we can test out the code by navigating to one of the URLs in our configuration. In this example, you will notice that both will redirect you to the Google website. You can change the routes.js to proxy to any host and port combination and combine it with some fancy path rewriting.

Authentication 🙈

Time to add authentication to our API gateway. Some routes in our configuration will require a valid user authentication to be included in requests in order to allow further execution. As mentioned in the prerequisites, we will be relying on Keycloak to validate access tokens of incoming requests.

Keycloak already supports Express integration through the keycloak-connect (https://www.npmjs.com/package/keycloak-connect) module. Let's start with the installation of the required modules:

npm install keycloak-connect express-session --save

Now we create a separate file called auth.js in order to configure our authentication and apply the different rules to the routes of our configuration:

const Keycloak = require('keycloak-connect');

const session = require('express-session');



const setupAuth = (app, routes) => {

var memoryStore = new session.MemoryStore();

var keycloak = new Keycloak({ store: memoryStore });



app.use(session({

secret:'<RANDOM GENERATED TOKEN>',

resave: false,

saveUninitialized: true,

store: memoryStore

}));



app.use(keycloak.middleware());



routes.forEach(r => {

if (r.auth) {

app.use(r.url, keycloak.protect(), function (req, res, next) {

next();

});

}

});

}



exports.setupAuth = setupAuth

Within our file we define a function called setupAuth, which takes the express app and our route configuration as input parameters. In order to enable the Keycloak integration we need to create a new memory store, setup the app to use sessions and activate the Keycloak middleware. Next, we can secure our endpoints by the following snippet:

app.use(r.url, keycloak.protect(), function (req, res, next) {

next();

});

This code adds the Keycloak middleware (keycloak.protect()) on the specified URL. An additional callback function is added enabling us to add additional logging to the code. In this case we just call the next() function which tells Express to just continue processing the request.

In order to make the Keycloak integration work, we also need an additional configuration file that contains some Keycloak specific information. Please refer to the official Keycloak documentation for more information on the setup. Below is an example keycloak.json configuration that was used within this project:

{

"realm": "<REALM>",

"bearer-only": true,

"auth-server-url": "<AUTH_URL>",

"ssl-required": "external",

"resource": "<CLIENT>",

"confidential-port": 0

}

The next step is to include the authentication setup into our main server. We can do this by updating our server.js file with the following code:

const express = require('express')



const {ROUTES} = require("./routes");



const {setupLogging} = require("./logging");

const {setupProxies} = require("./proxy");

const {setupAuth} = require("./auth");



const app = express()

const port = 3000;





setupLogging(app);

setupAuth(app, ROUTES);

setupProxies(app, ROUTES);



app.listen(port, () => {

console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`)

})

After restarting the server, you will notice that navigating to the premium url (http://localhost:3000/premium) will now result in an "Access Denied" page. However, the free url (http://localhost:3000/free) is still accessible 👍. You can use tools like Postman to add an access token to your requests in order to check if the Keycloak integration is working. In this case, Postman should also show the Google website when executing a GET request to the premium url.

Rate limiting ⛔️

The next phase of our implementation will add rate limiting to our gateway endpoints. In our example we will apply rate limiting to our free services. Reducing the throughput on certain services can have multiple advantages, such as a reduced and more controlled load on certain micro services, motivating users to go premium to remove throughput constraints,…

Just as with the other features we have implemented, there is already an NPM library, called express-rate-limit (https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-rate-limit), available to integrate rate limiting into an existing Express server. It can be installed by executing the following command:

npm install --save express-rate-limit

Following the installation, we continue our developments by creating a separate ratelimit.js file with the following contents:

const rateLimit = require("express-rate-limit");



const setupRateLimit = (app, routes) => {

routes.forEach(r => {

if (r.rateLimit) {

app.use(r.url, rateLimit(r.rateLimit));

}

})

}



exports.setupRateLimit = setupRateLimit

You will notice it again looks quite similar to the implementation of the other features. The above snippet loops through all routes and adds a rate limiting middleware if applicable for the given url. The settings provided to the rate limiting middleware can be found in the documentation of the module (https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-rate-limit) and is read directly from the configuration of the route in the routes.js file.

If we look at the routes.js config, we can see that we did apply rate limiting for the free routes by specifying the following property:

rateLimit: {

windowMs: 15 * 60 * 1000,

max: 5

},

These setting limit requests to the endpoint to a maximum of 5 requests each 15 minutes.

Next we need to activate the rate limiting settings upon creation of the server. This can be done by extending the server.js file with the following contents:

const express = require('express')



const {ROUTES} = require("./routes");



const {setupLogging} = require("./logging");

const {setupRateLimit} = require("./ratelimit");

const {setupProxies} = require("./proxy");

const {setupAuth} = require("./auth");



const app = express()

const port = 3000;





setupLogging(app);

setupRateLimit(app, ROUTES);

setupAuth(app, ROUTES);

setupProxies(app, ROUTES);



app.listen(port, () => {

console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`)

})

So now let's test our solution. Restart your server and go to the free endpoint at http://localhost:3000/free. Nothing has changed, right? Now refresh the page a couple of times. After refreshing about 5 times, you will see an error message: "Too many requests, please try again". We have now successfully limited the throughput to our services by applying rate limiting.

Credit Check 💰

The last thing we want to add is a credit check for requests to the premium endpoint. If the user does not have sufficient credits in his/her account to execute the request, it should be blocked.

In this post, however, we will create a more generic implementation of the credit check example. The goal of this chapter is to create any type of middleware where you want to do additional checks before redirecting or blocking the requests.

As you may have noticed during previous paragraphs, we've always made use of an Express middleware in order to combine them in a chain of request evaluation/execution. Express allows us to create a custom middleware and add it to the validation chain. Each middleware is defined as a function:

function(request, response, next) { // Add custom code here }

In the middleware function you have access to the request and response object and to a function called next. During the execution of the middleware, you have several choices:

End the processing of the request by sending a response to the client through the response object, for example:

res.status(500).send({error});

Finish the middleware and continue to the next middleware in the chain. This is where the next() function comes in. It tells Express that your middleware did not encounter any errors and it can continue the evaluation of the request through the next middleware.

So now let's put this into practice. In our example we want to do a credit check for each incoming request. We start by creating a function that will execute the actual credit check in a file called creditcheck.js.

const checkCredit = (request) => {

return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {

// Custom code here

if (ok) {

resolve();

} else {

reject('No credits');

} })

}

In the example above we have left out the actual code implementation of the credit check as that this can replaced by any custom code where you want to do additional checks based on the request object. However, to test the code, we could write some code that will result in a negative credit check with a delay of 500ms, simulating the execution of an additional request:

const checkCredit = (req) => {

return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {

console.log("Checking credit with token", req.headers["authorization"]);

setTimeout(() => {

reject('No sufficient credits');

}, 500);

})

}

As you can see in the code above, we will reject the promise, which represents an error or negative credit balance of the user. This code can easily be replaced by executing any additional request to another micro service that actually returns the amount of credits.

Our next step is to add the creditCheck function as a middleware in order to process our incoming requests:

const checkCredit = (req) => {

return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {

console.log("Checking credit with token", req.headers["authorization"]);

setTimeout(() => {

reject('No sufficient credits');

}, 500);

})

}



const setupCreditCheck = (app, routes) => {

routes.forEach(r => {

if (r.creditCheck) {

app.use(r.url, function(req, res, next) {

checkCredit(req).then(() => {

next();

}).catch((error) => {

res.status(402).send({error});

})

});

}

})

}



exports.setupCreditCheck = setupCreditCheck

The code above introduces a new middleware for each requests that should execute the credit check. Based on its execution requests will either be redirected or blocked. The actual code of the middleware is contained in the following snippet:

function(req, res, next) {

checkCredit(req).then(() => {

next();

}).catch((error) => {

res.status(402).send({error});

})

});

In this code we execute the creditCheck function and wait for its result. If it resolves correctly, we notify Express that the middleware has been executed successfully by calling the next() function. If the credit check was rejected, we stop the processing of the request and send a response back to the client.

The very last step in our implementation is to add the credit check configuration to the startup script of the server, resulting in our final server.js file:

const express = require('express')



const {ROUTES} = require("./routes");



const {setupLogging} = require("./logging");

const {setupRateLimit} = require("./ratelimit");

const {setupCreditCheck} = require("./creditcheck");

const {setupProxies} = require("./proxy");

const {setupAuth} = require("./auth");



const app = express()

const port = 3000;





setupLogging(app);

setupRateLimit(app, ROUTES);

setupAuth(app, ROUTES);

setupCreditCheck(app, ROUTES);

setupProxies(app, ROUTES);



app.listen(port, () => {

console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`)

})

The only thing left to do is to restart the server and the credit check will be applied to relevant routes in your routes.js configuration. You can easily test the credit check by enabling for your free routes as well. If you restart the server and navigate to the free url (http://localhost:3000/free), you will receive a message that you don't have sufficient credits 👍.

Keep in mind that we have also applied rate limiting to this route, so you may be too quick and have to wait for 15 minutes or disable the rate limiting all together.

All done! 👍

Great job! We have created our custom API gateway implementation. You can also find the full code on Github (https://github.com/JanssenBrm/api-gateway). I hope this post gave you a better insight on how to use a middleware in Express and the inspiration to add even more useful features to your API gateway. Keep coding!