How to install Envoy Proxy on Debian 11

Linux

Envoy is an L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large modern service-oriented architecture. The project was born out of the belief that the network should be transparent to applications. When network and applications problems occur, it should be easy to determine the source of the problem.

Envoy is an open-source edge and service proxy, designed for cloud-native applications. Let’s dive in and learn how to install Envoy on Debian 11.

High Level Envoy features

  • Its known for its advanced load balancing technique. It implements load balancing in a single place and have them accessible to any application.
  • It has front/edge proxy support.
  • It has best in class observability
  • It has gRPC support.
  • Has support for HTTP L7 routing
  • It supports HTTP/2
  • L3/L4 filter architecture. Envoy acts as a L3/L4 proxy
  • It support use of API for configuration management

Installing Envoy proxy server on Ubuntu 20.04

1. Update system repositories.

The first thing is to update system repositories in order to make them up to date. This will avoid running into errors in the process of installation.

When both updates and upgrades are complete, we can now install envoy dependencies.

2. Install Envoy proxy dependencies

Envoy requires some set of programs to run effectively such as curl for running downloads, lsb-release, etc. Let’s install the following;

You will see the following output.

3. Add GPG key to envoy repository

In order to sign the envoy program, we need to download the GPG key to self-sign it. Keys helps to prove the authenticity of the program’s downloads.

If you want, you can verify the key with the echo command, if you get an ok as the output then its signed therefore move ahead and install the program.

Now we need to add the key to sources.list.d repository. To do so use the following command.

We need to update our repositories again by doing an update again.

Whenever you update, you must see what you have added. Have look at the output below

4. Install Envoy Proxy on Debian 11

Now that we have completed all the prerequisites, we can now install Envoy proxy with the following command.

See the output below

We can check the Envoy version installed with the following command;

5. Run Envoy

To check Envoy commands use the help command

Let’s run Envoy with a demo configuration file

Create a demo.yaml file and run with the following command

**-c **tells envoy the path to its initial configuration

To know if Envoy is proxying, use the following

Conclusion

We have learned how to install Envoy proxy on Debian 11. To learn more of these check out the Envoy documentation.