Learn how to test your HAProxy Configuration. Properly testing your HAProxy configuration file is a simple, yet crucial part of administering your load balancer. Remembering to run one simple command after making a change to your configuration file can save you from unintentionally stopping your load balancer and bringing down your services.

The HAProxy load balancer provides a set of APIs for configuring it programmatically. Although many people enjoy the simplicity of configuring their HAProxy load balancer by directly editing its configuration file, /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg, others want a way to do it without logging into the server. Or, they want a way that integrates with bespoke software. For example, they want to add pools of servers to the load balancer programmatically as a part of their CI/CD deployment pipeline.

Learn how to Install HAProxy on Ubuntu 20.04. Ubuntu 20.04 is a great choice for installing your HAProxy software load balancer. It’s a free Linux operating system that’s fast, secure, and best of all, it’s easy to use. One of the features that makes Ubuntu so accessible to even the newest of users is its package manager, apt , the Advanced Packaging Tool.

If you are using HAProxy 2.0 or newer, it is important that you update to the latest version. A vulnerability was found that makes it possible to abuse the HTTP/2 parser, allowing an attacker to prepend hostnames to a request, append top-level domains to an existing domain, and inject invalid characters through the :method pseudo-header.

Can you run HAProxy as a Docker container? Yes! Did you even need to ask? Docker is ubiquitous these days and you’ll find that many applications have been Docker-ized; the HAProxy load balancer is no exception. Pardon the cliché, but HAProxy was born for this. As a standalone service that runs on Linux, porting it to Docker certainly seemed natural. Why would you want to run your load balancer inside of a Docker container? Are their performance penalties when doing so?