App Platform: Route request to specific container

Posted on January 15, 2025

Lets say I have an App on App Platform with a single component which has many containers running.

If I expose say a /metrics endpoint it could be served by any of the containers.

Is there a way for me to route requests to a specific container? I have noticed that there is an environment variable called HOSTNAME that is unique for each container such as “component-7f844c67c-7c4bx” which looks like it could work but it doesn’t appear to resolve DNS.

// The address of my app https://app-kssfa.ondigitalocean.app

// Some of the formats I have tried https://app-kssfa.component-56447c7b7d-jv862.ondigitalocean.app https://component-56447c7b7d-jv862.ondigitalocean.app

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Bobby

January 15, 2025

Hey David! 👋

In the DigitalOcean App Platform, requests are routed through a load balancer by default, which distributes traffic evenly across all running containers for scalability and reliability. Unfortunately, directly routing requests to a specific container isn’t supported because containers are designed to be stateless and interchangeable.

However, if specific behavior is needed for certain routes, you could split your app into multiple components and use path-based routing to direct traffic to the right component.

Example:

/api/v1 → Component A
/api/v2 → Component B

📖 More on URL Path Routing

If container-specific routing is critical, using Droplets with Nginx/HAProxy or a managed DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster might give you the fine-grained control you need.

Let me know if any of these work for you!

- Bobby