Proxy registration

[scheibling]

According to the documentation here and in the other repository, registering proxy instances is done by setting three parameters: control_plane_url, node_id and node_key

Except it doesn't look like there's any mention of control_plane_url, node_id and node_key in the base repository for zentinel, am I misunderstanding what is supposed to be registered with the control plane? Or is development here just a few months behind the proxy? In the case of the latter, maybe that could be made clearer in the documentation that this isn't a working product yet, it took me a while to figure that out

[raffaelschneider]

You understood it correctly — the documentation was wrong, not your reading of it. Sorry for the time lost.

I checked zentinelproxy/zentinel on main: there is no control-plane client in the proxy at all. No control_plane_url, node_id or node_key config keys exist (the only grep hit for node_key is vnode_key in the consistent-hash upstream code), and a stock proxy binary will never register, heartbeat, or pull a bundle. docs/PROXY-REGISTRATION.md section 2 told you to set three settings that don't exist.

To answer your question directly: it's the second option — the control plane is ahead of the proxy, not behind it. The control-plane side (registration, bundles, rollouts, JWT auth, events/metrics ingestion) is implemented and exercised end to end, but the node half of that loop is driven by the built-in node simulator, not by a real proxy.

Fixed in #8, now merged:

• A status callout at the top of PROXY-REGISTRATION.md stating the proxy has no native client yet.
• Section 2 rewritten from "Configure the Proxy" to "Connect the Proxy (external sidecar required today)", spelling out what a sidecar must actually do — heartbeat, poll bundles/latest, verify the checksum, reload the proxy, report active_bundle_id — with a working curl example.
• The README ## Status section now says that "works end-to-end" means on the control-plane side, since that phrasing is where the misunderstanding starts.

So: connecting real proxies today means running your own process alongside the proxy that speaks the node API. Native proxy-side support still needs to be built, and is worth its own tracking issue in the proxy repo.