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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 domain like https://your-api.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!​

What's next?​

← Check out more examples