Services

Finally, we have reached the last section of the routing, which is the services section. Now that all the middleware has been applied, the request is ready to be sent to the service.

Named services

The services we define in the services block register as named handlers in the router, so we can just call them by name in the router.

site.com, site.local:
  router:
    - api.site.com/:
        - api # This will call the service named `api`

Beacons and publishing

The alternative to forwarding the request to a service directly is to use the beacon and publish directives. This will instead send a message to the message broker, which can be picked up by a runner, as we will be exploring later.

site.com, site.local:
  router:
    - event.site.com/:
        - publish webhooks.event # This will publish the request to the `webhooks.event` topic and make sure it is delivered.
    - telemetry.site.com/:
        - beacon task.sentry # This will send a beacon to the `task.sentry` topic, but will not make the request wait.

The main difference between beacon and publish is that:

• a beacon is a fire-and-forget message with no delivery guarantee.
• a publish on the other hand will make sure the message is delivered before returning a response to the client.

The event.site.com route above will publish to the webhooks.event topic and make sure it is delivered before returning a 200 OK response to the client.

The telemetry.site.com route on the other hand will publish to the task.sentry topic, but issue 202 Accepted immediately.