proxify - (proof-of-concept) API proxy

Consuming APIs with SPAs reveals the API key to the end user. This is not the desired behavior, as one wants to keep his API key a secret.

This package starts an express server that proxies all POST requests to the API specified in the API_URL environment variable. The API key can be specified with API_KEY.

Usage

Locally

Create a .env file in this project root with the following settings:

API_URL=http://the-api-to-consume.example.com
API_KEY=123-456-789

To start the proxy simply run:

node index.js

The proxy server is now available on http://localhost:3000. You can override the port by using the PORT environment variable.

Usage with hotel

To use this package with hotel, run the following command in the project root:

hotel add 'node index.js --port $PORT' --name proxify --change-origin

After starting the server, the page should be available via http://proxify.dev

Production deployment

While usage of this project in a deployment environment is probably not recommended it's possible to deploy it to a server running Dokku.

git remote add dokku dokku@my-dokku-host.example.com:proxify
git push dokku master

Background

The project was conceived, while I was trying to consume the RMV API with a VueJS application. The RMV API expects the API key to be provided inside the URL as a parameter ?accessId=123-456-789.

Many thanks to the blog post of Travis Horn that guided me through the setup of this project.