Implement the 'Front Door' Pattern
The "front door" pattern involves using a Cloud Endpoint, the forward-internal Traffic Policy action, and an internal Agent Endpoint to route traffic from the public internet to your service(s).
With this pattern, you can:
- Host any number of services under a single hostname (e.g.
your-company.com). - Decouple gateway configuration from per-service traffic management policies.
- Prevent any driect exposure of your services or their host systems to the public internet.
- Route traffic and add authentication to microservices with a single API gateway configuration.
- Authenticate developer environments or CI preview builds behind a single endpoint.
1. Create an endpoint for your service
Start an internal Agent Endpoint, replacing $PORT based on where your service listens.
You can also use one of our SDKs or the Kubernetes Operator.
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2. Reserve a domain
Navigate to the Domains section of the ngrok dashboard and click New + to reserve a free static domain like https://your-service.ngrok.app or a custom domain you already own.
3. Create a Cloud Endpoint
Navigate to the Endpoints section of the ngrok dashboard, then click New + and Cloud Endpoint.
Now you have a Cloud Endpoint with the URL like https://your-service.ngrok.app.
4. Add routing to your service with Traffic Policy
Copy and paste the policy below into your new Cloud Endpoint in the ngrok dashboard.
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What's happening here?
On every HTTP request, the Traffic Policy engine forwards the traffic to the
internal agent endpoint you created at https://service.internal.
5. Add a second service and routing (optional)
If you have another service to host under the front door pattern, start another agent.
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5a. Update your routing based on paths
Copy and paste the policy below into the ngrok dashboard, replacing /one and /two with the paths you'd like to use for routing traffic to each service.
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6. Try out your endpoint!
- In your browser: https://your-service.ngrok.app
- In your terminal:
curl https://your-service.ngrok.app
What's next?
- Read more about Traffic Policy and its core concepts.
- Add authentication to your endpoint with the
oauthaction action orbasic-authaction. - View your traffic in Traffic Inspector.