Arc

Arc is an API Gateway that sits between a client and an ElasticSearch cluster. It acts as a reverse proxy, routing requests from clients to services. Arc is extended through plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the ElasticSearch's RESTful API. It can perform various cross-cutting tasks such as basic authentication, Role Based Access Control (using JWTs), logging, rate-limiting, source/referers whitelisting, analytics etc. These functionalities can clearly be extended by adding a plugin encapsulating a desired functionality. It also provides some useful abstractions that helps in managing and controlling the access to ElasticSearch's RESTful API.

Table of contents

• Overview
• Building
• Installation
• Implementation
• Available Plugins
• Use cases
• Docs

Overview

When Arc is deployed, every client request being made to the Elasticsearch will hit Arc first and then be proxied to the Elasticsearch cluster. In between requests and responses, Arc may execute the installed plugins, essentially extending the Elasticsearch API feature set. Arc effectively becomes an entry point for every API request made to Elasticsearch. Arc can be used and deployed against any Elasticsearch cluster (locally and hosted as provided by Appbase.io).

                             .------------------------------------------.
                             |                     |                    |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |   Authentication    |  Administration    |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |_____________________|____________________|
                             |                     |                    |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |   Search Relevancy  | ReactiveSearch API |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |_____________________|____________________|
                             |                     |                    |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |   Security   _______|_______  Caching    |
                             |             |               |            |
.----------------.           |             |               |            |           .-----------------.
|   Dashboard/   | --------> |_____________|      Arc      |____________| --------> |  Elasticsearch  |
|   REST APIs    | <-------- |             |               |            | <-------- |    upstream     |
.----------------.           |             |               |            |           .-----------------.
                             |             |_______________|            |
                             |   Logging           |         Analytics  |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |_____________________|____________________|
                             |                     |                    |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |   Query Rules       | Popular Suggestions|
                             |                     |                    |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |_____________________|____________________|
                             |                     |                    |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |   Synonyms          | Functions          |
                             |                     |                    |
                             |                     |                    |
                             .------------------------------------------.

Installation

Running it

In order to run arc, you'll require an Elasticsearch node. There are multiple ways you can setup an Elasticsearch, either locally or remotely. We, however, are delineating the steps for local setup of a single node Elasticsearch via it's Docker image.

Note: The steps described here assumes a docker installation on the system.

1. Create a docker network

    docker network create arc
   

2. Start a single node Elasticsearch cluster locally

    docker run -d --rm --name elasticsearch -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 --net=arc -e "discovery.type=single-node" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-oss:7.10.1
   

3. Start Arc locally

    docker build -t arc . && docker run --rm --name arc -p 8000:8000 --net=arc --env-file=config/docker.env arc
   

For convenience, the steps described above are combined into a single docker-compose file. You can execute the file with command:

docker-compose up

Building

To build from source you need Git and Go (version 1.11 or higher).

You can build the binary locally by executing the following command from the project directory:

make

This produces an executable & plugin libraries in the root project directory. To start the Arc server, run:

./build/arc --env=config/manual.env --log=info

Alternatively, you could execute the following commands to start the server without producing an executable, (but still produce the plugin libraries):

make plugins
go run main.go --env=config/manual.env

Note: Running the executable assumes an active Elasticsearch upstream whose URL is provided in the .env file.

Logging

Define the run time flag (log) to change the default log mode, the possible options are:

debug

Most verbose, use this to get logs for elasticsearch interactions.

info

Prints the basic information

error (default)

Only log the errors

CPU Profile

Set the cpuprofile flag to true at runtime to enable CPU profiling. Read this article to know more about the usage https://flaviocopes.com/golang-profiling/.

TLS Support

You can optionally start arc to serve https requests instead of http requests using the flag https. You also need to provide the server key & certificate file location through the environment file. config/manual.env is configured to use demo server key & certificates, which work for localhost.

    go run main.go --log=info --env=config/manual.env --https

If you wish to manually test TLS support at localhost, curl needs to be also passed an extra parameter providing the cacert, in this case.

    curl https://foo:bar@localhost:8000/_user --cacert sample/rootCA.pem

JWT Key Loading through HTTP

If you wish to test loading JWT Key through HTTP, you can use the following commands to start a HTTP server serving the key

    cd sample
    python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8500

Then start arc using the command:

    go run main.go --log=info --env=config/manual-http-jwt.env

Arc also exposes an API endpoint to set the key at runtime, so this need not be set initially.

Run Tests

Currently, tests are implemented for auth, permissions, users and billing modules. You can run tests using:

make test

or

go test -p 1 ./...

Implementation

The functionality in Arc can extended via plugins. An Arc plugin can be considered as a service in itself; it can have its own set of routes that it handles (keeping in mind it doesn't overlap with existing routes of other plugins), its own chain of middleware and more importantly its own database it intends to interact with (in our case it is Elasticsearch). For example, one can easily have multiple plugins providing specific services that interact with more than one database. The plugin is responsible for its own request lifecycle in this case.

However, it is not necessary for a plugin to define a set of routes for a service. A plugin can easily be a middleware that can be used by other plugins with no new defined routes whatsoever. A middleware can either interact with a database or not is an implementation choice, but the important point here is that a plugin can be used by other plugins as long as it doesn't end up being a cyclic dependency.

Each plugin is structured in a particular way for brevity. Refer to the plugin docs which describes a basic plugin implementation.

Abstractions

Since every request made to Elasticsearch hits Arc first, it becomes beneficial to provide a set of abstractions that allows the client to define control over the Elasticsearch RESTful API and Arc's functionality. Arc provides several essential abstractions that are required in order to interact with Elasticsearch and Arc itself.

Available Plugins

User

In order to interact with Arc, the client must define a User. A User encapsulates its own set of properties that defines its capabilities.

• username: uniquely identifies the user
• password: verifies the identity of the user
• is_admin: distinguishes an admin user
• categories: analogous to the Elasticsearch's API categories, like Cat API, Search API, Docs API and so on
• acls: adds another layer of granularity within each Elasticsearch API category
• ops: operations a user can perform
• indices: name/pattern of indices the user has access to
• email: user's email address
• created_at: time at which the user was created

Permission

A User grants a Permission to a certain User, predefining its capabilities in order to access Elasticsearch's RESTful API. Permissions serve as an entry point for accessing the Elasticsearch API and has a fixed time-to-live unlike a user, after which it will no longer be operational. A User is always in charge of the Permission they create.

• username: an auto generated username that uniquely identifies the permission
• password: an auto generated password that verifies the identity of the permission
• owner: represents the owner of the permission
• creator: represents the creator of the permission
• categories: analogous to the Elasticsearch's API categories, like Cat API, Search API, Docs API and so on
• acls: adds another layer of granularity within each Elasticsearch API category
• ops: operations a permission can perform
• indices: name/pattern of indices the permission has access to
• sources: source IPs from which a permission is allowed to make requests
• referers: referers from which a permission is allowed to make requests
• created_at: time at which the permission was created
• ttl: time-to-live represents the duration till which a permission remains valid
• limits: request limits per categories given to the permission
• description: describes the use-case of the permission

Category

Categories can be used to control access to data and APIs in Arc. Along with Elasticsearch APIs, Categories cover the APIs provided by Arc itself to allow fine-grained control over the API consumption. For Elasticsearch, Categories broadly resembles to the API classification that Elasticsearch provides such as Document APIs, Search APIs, Indices APIs and so on. For Arc, Categories resembles to the additional APIs on top of Elasticsearch APIs, such as analytics and book keeping. Refer to category docs for the list of categories that Arc supports.

ACL

ACLs allow a fine grained control over the Elasticsearch APIs in addition to the Categories. Each ACL resembles an action performed by an Elasticsearch API. For brevity, setting and organising Categories automatically sets the default ACLs associated with the set Categories. Setting ACLs adds just another level of control to provide access to Elasticsearch APIs within a given Category. Refer to acl docs for the list of acls that Arc supports.

Op

Operation delineates the kind of operation a request intends to make. The operation of the request is identified before the request is served. The classification of the request operation depends on the use-case and the implementation of the plugin. Operation is currently classified into three kinds:

• Read: operation permits read requests exclusively.
• Write: operation permits write requests exclusively.
• Delete: operation permits delete requests exclusively.

In order to allow a user or permission to make requests that involve modifying the data, a combination of the above operations would be required. For example: ["read", "write"] operation would allow a user or permission to perform both read and write requests but would forbid making delete requests.

Request Logging

Arc currently maintains records for all the requests made to elasticsearch. Both request and responses are stored for the users to view and inspect it later. The request logs can be fetched for both specific indices or the whole cluster. The dedicated endpoints to fetch the index/cluster logs can be found here.

Docs

Refer to the REST API docs for Arc.