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PactFlow On-Premises Architecture

System architecture​

Minimum requirements​

  • An application server capable of running Docker
  • PostgreSQL database
  • Redis Serialization Protocol (RESP)-compatible key/value cache
  • 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​

You can run the application without elevated privileges. It runs under the user 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​

There's a healthcheck endpoint at http://<HOST>/diagnostic/status/heartbeat meant for Docker container management tools.

  • It doesn't need authentication.
  • It doesn't touch the database.
  • You can use it to check if load balancer targets are working properly.

If you're running the healthcheck from inside the container, be sure to use the port specified by the $PACTFLOW_HTTP_PORT environment variable (defaults to 9292 if not set).

You can use supervisorctl to send the healthcheck request.

An example healthcheck configuration for Docker Compose:

healthcheck:
  test: ["supervisorctl", "status", "haproxy", "marko", "pactflow"]
  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.