planetmint/docs/root/source/node-setup/production-node/reverse-proxy-notes.md

Using a Reverse Proxy

You may want to:

• rate limit inbound HTTP requests,
• authenticate/authorize inbound HTTP requests,
• block requests with an HTTP request body that's too large, or
• enable HTTPS (TLS) between your users and your node.

While we could have built all that into Planetmint Server, we didn't, because you can do all that (and more) using a reverse proxy such as NGINX or HAProxy. (You would put it in front of your Planetmint Server, so that all inbound HTTP requests would arrive at the reverse proxy before maybe being proxied onwards to your Planetmint Server.) For detailed instructions, see the documentation for your reverse proxy.

Below, we note how a reverse proxy can be used to do some Planetmint-specific things.

You may also be interested in our NGINX configuration file template (open source, on GitHub).

Enforcing a Max Transaction Size

The Planetmint HTTP API has several endpoints, but only one of them, the POST /transactions endpoint, expects a non-empty HTTP request body: the transaction being submitted by the user.

If you want to enforce a maximum-allowed transaction size (discarding any that are larger), then you can do so by configuring a maximum request body size in your reverse proxy. For example, NGINX has the client_max_body_size configuration setting. You could set it to 15 kB with the following line in your NGINX config file:

client_max_body_size 15k;

For more information, see the NGINX docs about client_max_body_size.

Note: By enforcing a maximum transaction size, you indirectly enforce a maximum crypto-conditions complexity.