Overview

Lobby is a simple, yet highly performant, network traffic load balancer based on Linux nftables. It is designed to run as a portable binary app on Linux systems in amd64 and arm64 architectures.

Getting Started (without docker)

Info

In case you have docker installed in the same host as where you're planning to run Lobby, follow this instead.

On a amd64 or arm64 Linux system, simply:

Get Lobby

wget -q -O - https://ipbuff.com/getLobby | sh

And that's it! It is all it takes to get Lobby available on your system

This command downloads and runs a script which makes Lobby available on your current directory by downloading the Lobby binary to your current folder which becomes accessible with ./lobby

It also sets up a demo configuration file in ./lobby.conf. The demo configuration will get Lobby to load balance all TCP traffic hitting the Lobby host on port 8082 to a cloud server used for Lobby testing at lobby-test.ipbuff.com:8081, lobby-test.ipbuff.com:8082 and lobby-test.ipbuff.com:8083 in round-robin distribution mode.

The only thing you have to ensure before running Lobby is that IP forwarding is enabled on your host system. In case you need help with this, check this article about it.

You should be able to get Lobby up and running as a privileged user with:

Run Lobby

./lobby

In case of failure

If you get a permissions error, make sure you run lobby as 'root' user or with sudo or doas. To learn more on how to run as unprivileged user check here

If you haven't changed anything on the demo config file, you should be able to successfully target your Lobby host on port 8082 from another machine to test if Lobby is working correctly.

This can be achieved in many ways. One of them is with:

Test Lobby from another machine

for i in {1..6}; do curl <IP of Lobby host>:8082; done

Result

In case of success, this test will call the load balancer 6 times on port 8082 and Lobby will load balance the traffic in round-robin mode across 3 different Lobby test upstreams.

The expected output is:

In case of failure

Make sure this test is performed from another machine as the traffic from the test machine is to be proxied through the Lobby host to the configured upstream. curl localhost:8082 won't work and is expected to fail.

If your only option is to test locally, consider using this docker setup.

To stop Lobby just send it an SIGINT signal with a Ctrl + c from the terminal that is running it or through the kill or pkill commands.

In order to setup the load balancing as per your needs, feel free to edit the ./lobby.conf config file. You'll be able to find the full configuration reference here.

With Lobby running, when it receives a SIGHUP signal, it will reprocess the config file and reconfigure the load balancing based on the updated config file contents.

Getting Started (with docker)

Note

Before using the examples below, please make sure to run the commands from a directory in which you want to store the Lobby configuration file lobby.conf

This demo configuration will be used for test purposes.

Get Lobby Demo Config File

wget -q \
  -O lobby.conf \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ipbuff/lobby/main/docs/examples/demo.conf

In order to run Lobby on docker use the command below:

docker run --rm -d \
  --name lobby  \
  --cap-add=NET_ADMIN --cap-add=NET_RAW \
  -v $(pwd)/lobby.conf:/lobby/lobby.conf \
  -p 8082:8082 \
  ipbuff/lobby:latest

Now, to test, let's check the load balancing to the Lobby test servers with:

for i in {1..6}; do curl localhost:8082; done

Result

In case of success, this test will call the load balancer 6 times on port 8082 and Lobby will load balance the traffic in round-robin mode across 3 different Lobby test upstreams.

The expected output is:

Finally, when you're done with testing, just stop the Lobby container with:

docker stop lobby

In order to setup the load balancing as per your needs, feel free to edit the ./lobby.conf config file. You'll be able to find the full configuration reference here.

With Lobby running, when it receives a SIGHUP signal, it will reprocess the config file and reconfigure the load balancing based on the updated config file contents. To send a SIGHUP to the Lobby container just:

docker kill -s SIGHUP lobby

Learning More

In case you're interested in learning more about Lobby, you'll be able to find here more about its feature set, installation options, configuration reference, tutorials and how to get additional support.