Spring HATEOAS and Ribbon with Eureka - host name in created links - spring

Question

I'm using Spring HATEOAS to build and access a REST service. The service registers itself with a eureka server, and I use Ribbon (via #LoadBalanced RestTemplate) to call it.
Per default, the requests are made for the hostname (in the Host header) for the resolved instance. This causes the LinkBuilder in Spring HATEOAS to generate links for this host. When Ribbon makes a request to follow a link, it tries to lookup the link host name in eureka again and of course gets no result.
What is the best level to address this situation? After receiving the links with the first result, I guess it would be acceptable to direct the immediate following requests to the same service instance, I still feel making all requests to the symbolic service name would be better.
Is it possible to configure Ribbon to make requests with that service name in the Host header (assuming no virtual hosting in the target service, that seems to be a valid assumption)?
Otherwise is it possible to set a canonical base URL for the link builder in HATEOAS? (defining all links as complete strings is not acceptable for me)
My solution/workaround for now is explicitly setting an X-Forwarded-Host header when requesting the root resource. This works, but is a bit verbose and cumbersome.
Traverson traverson = new Traverson(URI.create("http://photo-store/"), MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_UTF8, MediaTypes.HAL_JSON).setRestOperations(imageService);
HttpHeaders httpHeaders = new HttpHeaders();
httpHeaders.set("X-Forwarded-Host", "photo-store");
String original = this.traverson.follow("image:original").withHeaders(httpHeaders).asTemplatedLink().expand(photoId).getHref();
(Side question: can I override the Host header like that, or is it treated special in Ribbon or RestTemplate?)
I feel that there should be a more declarative or convention or configuration based way to deal with this. Is there?

Answer 1

I also faced same problem. I resolved it by adding interceptor which adds X-Forwarded-Host header to every request.
#Bean
#LoadBalanced
RestTemplate restTemplate() {
RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
restTemplate.setInterceptors(singletonList((ClientHttpRequestInterceptor) (request, body, execution) -> {
request.getHeaders().add("X-Forwarded-Host", request.getURI().getHost());
return execution.execute(request, body);
}));
return restTemplate;
}

Answer 2

I am using my own linkBuilder which fetches the name of the service from the properties and uses that as a Hostname. This is pretty basic, but easy to use and implement. If you want to use the whole spring hateoas link discovery magic sauce, you need to do more. But right now I'm searching for a solution that fits better with Spring Hateoas 1.x myself, so maybe I'll find a better answer soon.
The quick and dirty way:
#Component
public class MyLinkBuilder {
#Value("${spring.application.name}")
private String servicename;
public Link getLink(String path) {
String root = "http://" + servicename;
return new Link(root + path);
}
public Link getLink(String path, String rel) {
return getLink(path, LinkRelation.of(rel));
}
public Link getLink(String path, LinkRelation rel) {
String root = "http://" + servicename;
return new Link(root + path, rel);
}
}