Building an Edge Gateway: From Zero to Production

Setting up a production-grade edge gateway used to mean configuring Nginx, managing SSL certificates, setting up a WAF, wiring up authentication, configuring DNS records, and monitoring it all. It was a multi-day project for each new service.

With Ngris, you can go from zero to a fully configured production edge gateway in under an hour. Here's how.

Step 1: Install and Connect

That's it. Your local server is now accessible via a public URL with TLS termination. But that's just the start.

Step 2: Add a Custom Domain

In the Ngris dashboard, navigate to your endpoint and add a custom domain. Ngris automatically provisions DNS records and TLS certificates via Let's Encrypt. No manual certificate management.

The custom domains guide walks through each step.

Step 3: Enable the WAF

Ngris includes a traffic-policy engine with 23 rule types across four phases — among them a built-in, Coraza-powered Web Application Firewall. Enable it with one click in the dashboard, or from the agent when the tunnel starts:

The default ruleset covers: SQL injection, XSS, path traversal, command injection, HTTP method filtering, bot detection, and more. You can also use AI-powered analysis to generate custom rules based on your traffic patterns.

Step 4: Configure Authentication

Per-endpoint access control is built in. Choose from multiple auth methods:

Step 5: Set Up Traffic Policies

Traffic policies let you control how requests flow through your gateway:

• Rate limiting — per-IP, per-endpoint, or global
• Request transformation — add/remove headers, rewrite paths
• Circuit breakers — fail fast when your backend is struggling
• Geographic blocking — allow or deny by country
• Load balancing — distribute across multiple agents

Step 6: Multi-Agent Load Balancing & Routing

For production workloads, you can connect multiple agents to the same endpoint. Ngris automatically load-balances traffic across them using configurable strategies (round-robin, least connections, geographic).

Need more control? Routing rules let you direct specific requests to a particular agent based on path, header, cookie, client IP, or HTTP method. This enables blue/green canary deployments, path-based routing (e.g. /api/* to one agent, /web/* to another), and team-specific backends — all from a single hostname.

Step 7: Monitor and Respond

Every request is logged with full metadata. The traffic inspector shows request/response details in real-time. Anomaly detection alerts you to unusual patterns. And the built-in helpdesk system handles support tickets from your users.

What You Get in Under an Hour

Start building your production edge gateway today — create a free account and run your first tunnel in 30 seconds.