Dev
Mission Control — Web

Mission Control — Web

Deny requests to your Rails app.

You might have noticed that Mission Control — Jobs, isn’t simply titled “Mission Control”. That’s because it was developed alongside another useful tool, Mission Control — Web.

Today I’m pleased to announce that we are open sourcing Mission Control — Web and you can find it on GitHub.

Here’s how it looks:

Admin dashboard of Mission Control — Web
Admin dashboard of Mission Control — Web

What’s it for?

Mission Control — Web allows immediate control of web requests during incidents, by denying access to parts of the application, defined by specific paths.

My colleague Jorge proposed Mission Control — Web in 2022. He identified the need for such a tool during previous incidents, where a whole application became unavailable due to specific features being unperformant.

This is admittedly a simple tool, but it’s a nice lever to be able to pull in case of emergency.


What does it do?

It has two parts: an admin dashboard and a middleware. These can be configured in the same app, or ideally, two separate apps. They share a Redis database.

The Admin dashboard is used to set up a list of paths, defined as regex patterns. Requests to these paths will be denied in the application configured with the middleware.

Version 0.2.0 is available now. We hope you find it useful! If you are interested in contributing, we have prepared a list of improvements and new features we’d like to see in the future, some of them great for first-time contributors.