Heroku Buildpack: Wallarm Node

The Wallarm Node buildpack provides Wallarm WAF inside a dyno and connects NGINX to an app server via UNIX domain sockets.
This buildpack is based on heroku-buildpack-nginx.

Wallarm Node

Wallarm Node does the following:

• Blocks malicious requests and filters the valid ones
• Analyzes the company’s entire network traffic
• Collects the network traffic metrics and uploads the metrics to the Wallarm cloud
• Downloads fine-tuned resource-specific rules from the Wallarm cloud

Versions

This buildpack updates automatically and installs the latest stable version of Wallarm Node.

Requirements

• You have a Wallarm account with deploy permissions.
• Your webserver listens to the socket at /tmp/nginx.socket.
• You touch /tmp/app-initialized when you are ready for traffic.
• You can start your web server with a shell command.

Quick start

These are two setup examples. One example is for a new app; another one is for an existing application. In both cases, we are using Ruby & Unicorn. Note: this buildpack is not Ruby specific.

• Create a new application
• Update an existing unicorn application

Features

• Protects your resources from hacker attacks.
• L2met friendly NGINX log format.
• Heroku request ids embedded in NGINX logs.
• Crashes dyno if a NGINX or an app server crashes. Safety first.
• Language/App Server agnostic.
• Customizable NGINX configuration.
• Application coordinated dyno starts.

Language/App Server Agnostic

The Wallarm Node buildpack provides the wallarm/bin/start-wallarm command. This command takes another command as an argument. You must pass your app server’s startup command to start-wallarm.

For example, to get Wallarm Node and Unicorn up and running:

$ cat Procfile
web: wallarm/bin/start-wallarm bundle exec unicorn -c config/unicorn.rb

Environment variables

You can use the following environment variables:

• WALLARM_USER - user at my.wallarm.com with permissions to add new nodes.
• WALLARM_PASSWORD - user password.
• WALLARM_MODE - WAF mode: off, monitoring (default; detect but not block), block (detect and block).
• WALLARM_API_HOST - address of Wallarm API service (“api.wallarm.com” by default)
• WALLARM_TARANTOOL_MEMORY - amount of memory (in GB) allocated to the postanalytics module (0.5 of total memory by default).
• WALLARM_ENABLED - Disable all wallarm services if set and has value other then “yes” or “true”.

Example: set your WALLARM_MODE to the blocking mode:

$ heroku config:set WALLARM_MODE=block

Example: disable all the Wallarm features for the debug purposes:

$ heroku config:set WALLARM_ENABLED=no

Customizable NGINX configuration

You can provide your own NGINX configuration by creating a file named nginx.conf.erb in the directory wallarm/etc. Start by copying the buildpack’s default config file.

Application/Dyno coordination

The buildpack will not start NGINX with the Wallarm module until a file is written to /tmp/app-initialized. Since NGINX binds to the dyno’s $PORT and since $PORT determines if the app can receive traffic, you can delay NGINX accepting traffic until your application is ready to handle it. The examples below show how/when you should write the file when working with Unicorn.

License

Copyright (c) 2017 Wallarm, Inc.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.