IssueTracker

Currently, when launching the development server with multiple modules and a dispatch file a separate dispatcher instance is started and only requests to the dispatcher are dispatched to the appropriate module.  Currently, in the scenario where multiple modules act as static content servers  and a single module acts as the api for the static content, it is not convenient to run this setup locally.

For example:

dispatch.yaml

 -url: "*/api/*"
  module: default

 -url: "www.example.com"
  module: mod-www

 -url: "fun.example.com"
  module: mod-fun

And when I start the dev serve I get something like:

> dev_appserver.py api-server mod-www mod-fun dispatch.yaml

 Starting API server at: http://localhost:59413
 Starting dispatcher running at: http://127.0.0.1:8080
 Starting module "default" running at: http://127.0.0.1:8081
 Starting module "mod-www" running at: http://127.0.0.1:8082
 Starting module "mod-fun" running at: http://127.0.0.1:8083

Since the development server doesn't support hostname dispatching I can't put something in my /etc/hosts/ that point to the dispatcher and hit the correct module (i.e. if I were to put additional testing entries in my dispatch.yaml that supported something like www.localhost it wouldn't work).  But, if I make requests on port 8082 it does not dispatch the requests on path */api/* as it would if I was running in the app engine.  It would be nice if when I hit a particular module port in the development server it would dispatch on the path setup in the dispatch.yaml.

I have worked around this by implementing my own dispatcher with a simple node server.  It would be nice if the development server just handled this directly though.  Here is an example workaround node server:

var express = require('express');
var devRest = require('dev-rest-proxy');

var appList = [];

[
    {from: 3030, to: 8080},
    {from: 3031, to: 8081},
    {from: 3032, to: 8082},
    {from: 3033, to: 8083}
].forEach(
    function(item) {
        createServer(item);
    }
);

function createServer(portMap) {
    var app = express();
    appList.push(app);

    app.all('/api/*', function(req, res) {
        devRest.proxy(req,res, 'localhost', 8081);
    });

    app.all('*', function(req, res) {
        devRest.proxy(req,res, 'localhost', portMap.to);
    });

    var server = app.listen(portMap.from, function(){
        console.log('Express server listening on port ' + server.address().port);
    });

}