Feature: programmatic startup/shutdown improvements

While writing integration tests for plugin I wish I had 3 main features in the gateway:

1. A way to shutdown a gateway instance (mainly for testing purposes, when you want to cleanup the resources).

gatewayInstance.close().then(()=>console.log("It's over"));

1. A way to know that the gateway is ready to get requests; the run method might return a Promise

gatewayInstance.run().then(()=>console.log("Time to proxy requests"));

1. A way to feed the gateway configuration from the code directly, and not being constrained to give file paths or directories.

const systemConfig = {};
const gatewayConfig = {}

gateway().load(systemConfig, gatewayConfig).run().then(...)

[DrMegavolt]

@jbalsip quick comment on logs https://github.com/ExpressGateway/express-gateway/blob/ca7b7aff62e36b00ea0aace5a3216edf5d8522f8/lib/plugins.js#L65

in plugin context a logger is passed. a special one for plugins. It log level is controlled by process.env.LOG_LEVEL_PLUGINS https://github.com/ExpressGateway/express-gateway/blob/master/lib/logger.js#L48

so logs will not be mixed LOG_LEVEL_PLUGINS=debug (internal policies use LOG_LEVEL_POLICY) so you should see mostly logs from your plugin and other custom plugins

or use some lib like debug to completely separate output

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+1 to see the tests from your PoC

Our current helpers cover scenarios of running EG in the same process and as a separate process (looks ugly but seems to work) We use separate process to run E2E tests, but those helpers were never utilized in external plugin so it is hard to tell if it actually works correctly

Feel free to make small PRs with helpers as you see it. At some point the picture of helpers will be more or less complete so we document the approach as beta feature on the EG.io site and in the release notes. I believe feedback from others will follow, so the helpers can be improved and moved out of beta status.

beta is mostly to avoid migration issues. One can always reference specific version of EG in their plugin and do migration in there own pace.

Thanks!

[toryalsip]

That is very helpful @DrMegavolt and thank you. I’ll be sure to incorporate that into what I’m working on.