Core Concepts

import { Card, CardGrid } from ‘@astrojs/starlight/components’;

MiniGateway is built around a few core concepts that make it flexible and powerful.

Architecture Overview

MiniGateway follows a modular architecture with three main components:

The heart of MiniGateway - handles routing, proxy logic, and request transformation. Extensible plugins for authentication, rate limiting, logging, and custom transformations. A modern dashboard for monitoring, configuration, and real-time analytics.

Routing

Routes define how incoming requests are matched and forwarded to target services.

Route Matching

Routes are matched using path patterns with support for:

• Exact matching: /api/users matches exactly that path
• Wildcard matching: /api/* matches any path starting with /api/
• Parameter matching: /api/users/:id extracts id as a parameter

Route Configuration

Each route can be configured with:

Property	Description
path	The incoming path pattern to match
target	The destination URL to proxy to
methods	HTTP methods to allow (GET, POST, etc.)
plugins	Plugins to apply for this route
timeout	Request timeout in milliseconds

Plugins

Plugins extend MiniGateway’s functionality. They can be applied globally or to specific routes.

Built-in Plugins

Plugin	Purpose
auth	Authentication and authorization
rate-limit	Request rate limiting
transform	Request/response transformation
cache	Response caching
logger	Request logging

Custom Plugins

You can create custom plugins by implementing the Plugin interface:

interface Plugin {
  name: string;
  onRequest?: (context: RequestContext) => Promise<void>;
  onResponse?: (context: ResponseContext) => Promise<void>;
}

Storage

MiniGateway uses a database for storing configuration and runtime data.

Supported Databases

• SQLite: Local development and small deployments
• LibSQL: Turso/LibSQL for distributed edge deployments
• PostgreSQL: Enterprise deployments (planned)

Schema

The core schema includes:

• routes: Route definitions
• plugins: Plugin configurations
• logs: Request/response logs
• metrics: Performance metrics