Noport

Easily setup localhost subdomains for you local servers.

The UI configures a local nginx server listening on ports 80 and 433 to proxy traffic to the ports where you run your projects, mapping them by subdomain.

The "Save" button saves your configuration to ~/.noport.json. The "Install" button saves and then installs an /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file generated from your configuration.

Setup

• Linux
• OSX
• Windows

Linux

Install nginx.

# pacman -Syu nginx       # or `apt-get install nginx`, etc.
# systemctl start nginx   # start nginx running on port 80 (http://localhost)
# systemctl enable nginx  # start nginx on boot
# systemctl status nginx  # check the service's status

noport works by running a server that generates and changes /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. For that reason, it needs permission to write that file. One way to arrange that is to create a group called noport for that purpose.

After installing nginx, usually:

$ ls -l /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root ... /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Set the owner group to noport and grant write access by members of the group:

# groupadd noport
# chown root:noport /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
# chmod g+w /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root noport ... /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Add yourself to the noport group. You will need to log out and log back in, or restart the machine for the change to take effect. Check running groups.

# gpasswd -a spelufo noport

You should now be able to write to the file. Check with:

$ touch /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

OSX

Install nginx with brew.

brew install nginx

The nginx server will run through launchd as a regular user, and the config is at /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf. You can (re)start it with:

brew services restart nginx

Windows

Install nginx for windows. It comes as a zip file that decompreses to a folder from where you run nginx.exe manually. I've put it at D:\Programs\nginx.

Configure noport by setting the following environment variables (e.g. from windows settings):

NOPORT_NGINX_EXE=D:\Programs\nginx\nginx.exe
NOPORT_NGINX_CONF=D:\Programs\nginx\conf\nginx.conf

Save nginx.bat and nginx_reload.bat to nginx's folder.

Setup nginx.bat to run at startup: Press Win+R and enter "shell:startup" which will open explorer to the startup folder. Creating a shortcut here causes the target of the shortcut to run at startup. Right click, new shortcut, and set the target to nginx.bat.

Restart or run nginx.bat to start nginx.

nginx_reload.bat reloads the configuration after you make changes with noport. TODO: Make noport trigger the reload, like on osx and linux.

Running

noport is a self-contained static binary. Download it and put it somewhere in your PATH to install it. Run noport without arguments to start the server.

Open http://localhost:8012 for the web interface.

You can keep it running however you plan on running your other services. One option is to user systemd user services. Or you can just start it manually when you want to change the configuration. The changes persist in your nginx.conf.

Development

Build it

./dev.sh build ~/bin/noport

Run in development mode

Start the server.

./dev.sh server

Run the frontend figwheel server, that builds and hotloads cljs and css code.

./dev.sh front

Missing features

This are some features that noport lacks that it would be nice to add.

• SSL certificates with mkcert
• Reorder items.
• Installer script.
• AUR package.
• Leverage ports.json to suggest servers and avoid collisions.
• Windows, reload automatically.

TODO

• Fix gin warnings. Run in gin production mode.