nack is a Rack server built on top of the Node.js HTTP server. Node does all the hard work of accepting and parsing HTTP requests and nack simply passes it along to a Ruby worker process as a serialized object. You can read more about how the [IPC protocol][nack-protocol(7)] works. Besides running as a standalone Rack server, you can use the JS API to run multiple apps from the same Node process.

Simple proxy

var http = require('http');
var nack = require('nack');

var app = nack.createProcess("/path/to/app/config.ru");

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  app.proxy(req, res);
}).listen(8124, "127.0.0.1");

You can spawn up a pool of workers with:

var nack = require('nack');
nack.createPool("/path/to/app/config.ru", { size: 3 });

Workers can idle out after a period of inactivity:

// Timeout after 15m
nack.createPool("/path/to/app/config.ru", { idle: 15 * 60 * 1000 });

Theres a more friendly server API that returns a Connect application.

var connect = require('connect');
var nack    = require('nack');

connect.createServer(
  connect.logger(),
  connect.vhost('foo.test',
    nack.createServer("/u/apps/foo/config.ru")
  ),
  connect.vhost('bar.test',
    nack.createServer("/u/apps/bar/config.ru")
  )
).listen(3000);

You can grab the package from npm.

npm install nack

• node >= 0.6.x
• node-netstring
• rack
• json

nack was design to be used as a local development proxy. You probably don't wanna try running a production app on it. I'm sure its slow too so don't send me any benchmarks.

Copyright (c) 2010 Joshua Peek.

Released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.

nack(1), nack-protocol(7), nack-server(3), nack-pool(3), nack-process(3)