emissary

Encore – The Backend Development Engine

Emissary

When you deploy an Encore application to your own cloud Emissary is deployed alongside. It provides the Encore platform a way to access resources with your clouds private network in an authenticated manner.

It's primary use right now is to allow the Encore platform a way to tunnel to your SQL database to perform the database migrations to your application and to allow access to the database from the Encore CLI

How it works

Emissary is split into two modules:

• the server module which is the binary we deploy to your cloud.
• the library module (this folder) which serves as the client library and is used by our platform to establish connections.

The library provides a emissary.Dialer which provides a Dial and a DialContext method. These can be provided to most Go networking enabled code as an underlying Dial function. When that other Go code tries to open a socket, it will use the emissary.Dialer to establish the socket, which in-turn will be transparently routed through the Emissary server.

The Emissary server upon receiving the request, with authenticate the request using a shared secret key. Once authenticated, the dialer can then request the server forwards the connection onto one of a predefined list of allowed remote resources within the private network.

At the bottom most level, Emissary is simply a Socks 5 client/server however we wrap the socks 5 connection in a transport layer, which allows us to run Emissary in various locations to adapt to requirements in the target cloud.

                      ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                      │Go `net.Conn`                                                            │
┌────────────────┐    │  ┌────────────────┐     ┌─────────────────────┐     ┌────────────────┐  │    ┌────────────────┐
│                │    │  │                │     │Transport Layer      │     │                │  │    │                │
│ Go             │    │  │ Emissary       │     │ ┌─────────────────┐ │     │ Emissary       │  │    │ Target         │
│                ├───►│  │                ├────►│ │Socks 5 Protocol │ ├────►│                │  ├───►│ Remote         │
│ Client         │    │  │ Dialer         │     │ └─────────────────┘ │     │ Server         │  │    │ Resource       │
│                │    │  │                │     │                     │     │                │  │    │                │
└────────────────┘    │  └────────────────┘     └─────────────────────┘     └────────────────┘  │    └────────────────┘
                      │                                                                         │
                      └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Currently, the only supported transport layer is a websocket; this transport layer allows Emissary to run behind HTTP aware load balancers or in environments which only allow HTTP traffic in. In such environments we expect TLS termination to have occurred at the edge before the code executes such as AWS Lambda functions.

To learn how to configure an Emissary server see example.env. The server will load the configuration from either environmental variables or an .env file located within the working directory.