How To Install HAProxy on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HAProxy on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, HAProxy is a free HTTP/TCP high availability load balancer and proxy server. It spreads requests among multiple servers to mitigate issues resulting from a single server failure. HA Proxy is used by a number of high-profile websites including GitHub, Bitbucket, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Tuenti, and is used in the OpsWorks product from Amazon Web Services.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation HAProxy on an Ubuntu 18.04 bionic beaver.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install HAProxy on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Network Details.

To install and configure HAProxy load balancer on Ubuntu 18.04 we will consider three systems as follows:

Web Server Details:
  Server 1:    web1.idroot.us     192.168.1.104
  Server 2:    web2.idroot.us     192.168.1.105
HAProxy Server: 
  HAProxy:     haproxy            192.168.1.46

Step 3. Installing HAProxy on Ubuntu.

At first, we will install HAProxy by executing the below commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vbernat/haproxy-1.7
sudo apt update
sudo apt install haproxy

Step 4. Configuring HAProxy.

Now edit HAProxy default configuration file /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg and start configuration:

nano /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

At the end of the file we will add the following information:

frontend Local_Server
bind 192.168.1.46:80
mode http
default_backend webserver

backend webserver
mode http
balance roundrobin
option forwardfor
http-request set-header X-Forwarded-Port %[dst_port]
http-request add-header X-Forwarded-Proto https if { ssl_fc }
option httpchk HEAD / HTTP/1.1rnHost:localhost
server system1.osradar.com 192.168.1.104:80
server system2.osradar.com 192.168.1.105:80 

To verify the configuration:

sudo haproxy -c -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

If the above command returns output as “configuration file is valid” then restart the HAProxy service:

systemctl restart haproxy

Step 5. Accessing HAProxy.

With the HAProxy configured and running, open your load balancer server’s public IP in a web browser and check that you get connected to your backend correctly. The parameter stats URI in the configuration enables the statistics page at the defined address:

http://192.168.0.46

Congratulations! You have successfully installed HAProxy. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the HAProxy load balancer in Ubuntu 18.04 bionic beaver system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official HAProxy website.