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PactFlow On-Premises Architecture

System architecture

Minimum requirements

  • An application server capable of running Docker
  • PostgreSQL database
  • SAML IDP for SSO
  • PactFlow license file
  • Deploy to a service designed for Docker container orchestration (ECS, Fargate, Kubernetes etc.)

Example AWS deployment using ECS

System architecture

Internal architecture

The PactFlow On-Premises application is distributed as a Docker image. It is based on the open source Pact Broker, which is a Ruby application.

Application user requirements

The PactFlow application does not need any elevated privileges to run. It runs under the user app:app.

Application port

The PactFlow application runs on port 9292 by default. This can be configured by setting the PACTFLOW_HTTP_PORT environment variable.

Healthcheck endpoint

A healthcheck endpoint for use by a Docker container managment service is available at http://<HOST>/diagnostic/status/heartbeat. No authentication is required. This endpoint does not make a connection to the database.

If the healthcheck is running from inside the container, make sure to use the port defined in the environment variable $PACTFLOW_HTTP_PORT, which defaults to 9292. You can use wget to perform the healthcheck request.

An example healthcheck configuration for Docker Compose:

healthcheck:
test: ["CMD", "wget", "-nv", "-t1", "--spider", "http://localhost:9292/diagnostic/status/heartbeat"]
interval: 30s
timeout: 10s
retries: 3

To check the connection to the database, use the endpoint /diagnostic/status/dependencies. This endpoint should not be used by Docker container managment services, as unrelated database issues might cause the Docker container to churn.

License file

PactFlow on-premises version requires a license file to run. Contact us if you have not received one when your account was setup. See the section on licenses for installation instructions.