prebid-server

Server side component to offload prebid processing to the cloud

Discussion group for development / adapter testing

http://redditadops.slack.com channel headerbidding-dev

Current Status of Adapters (May 15, 2017)

Working on live sites:

• AppNexus web

In testing:

• Facebook web
• Rubicon web

Under development / pending testing:

• Pubmatic (waiting for clean & stable usersync endpoint and param compatibility with client-side prebid)
• Index Exchange (waiting for stable endpoint)
• PulsePoint (in code review)

How it works

The client (typically prebid.js) sends a JSON request to Prebid Server at /auction. See static/pbs_request.json for the format. Prebid Server forms OpenRTB requests, sends them to the appropriate adapters, concatenates the responses, and returns them to the client.

A few key points:

• No ranking or decisioning is performed by Prebid Server. It just proxies requests.
• No ad quality management (malware, viruses, deceptive creatives) is performed by Prebid Server
• Prebid Server does no fraud scanning and does nothing to prevent bad traffic.

User synching

Prebid Server provides a /setuid endpoint that allows adapters to push in their user IDs. These are stored in a cookie named, creatively, uids. To see stored cookies, call /getuids. To set an optout cookie, call /optout. When an adapter doesn't have a synched cookie, a no_cookie response is returned with a usersync URL that the client should call via asynchronous pixel or equivalent. If Prebid Server doesn't have a cookie set, a preemptive no_cookie response is returned to allow the client to ask for user consent and drop a cookie.

Logging

Prebid Server does no server-side logging. It can stream metrics to an InfluxDB endpoint, which are aggregated as a time series. Prebid Server has no user profiling or user-data collection capabilities.

Usage

Without Docker

Prerequisites

• Go
• Glide

Hosted version

AppNexus is hosting a version (generally bleeding-edge of this repo including some in-flight pull requests) at https://prebid.adnxs.com.

Getting

1. Install glide: https://github.com/Masterminds/glide#install
2. cd $GOPATH
3. git clone https://github.com/prebid/prebid-server src/github.com/prebid/prebid-server
4. cd src/github.com/prebid/prebid-server
5. glide install
6. ./validate.sh

Running

To compile a binary and run locally:

$ make build
$ ./prebid-server -v 1 -logtostderr

With Docker

Prerequisites

• Docker

Compiling an alpine binary

The Dockerfile for prebid-server copies the binary in the root directory to the docker container, and must be specifically be compiled for the target architecture (alpine).

$ docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/go/src/github.com/prebid/prebid-server \
-w /go/src/github.com/prebid/prebid-server \
billyteves/alpine-golang-glide:1.2.0 \
/bin/bash -c 'glide install; go build -v'

The above command will run a container with the necessary dependencies (alpine, go 1.8, glide) and compile an alpine compatible binary.

Build prebid-server docker container

# make image

Run container

This command will run a prebid-server container in interactive mode and map the 8000 port to your machine's 8000 port so that you can visit http://localhost:8000 and see prebid-server's index page.

$ docker run --rm -it -p 8000:8000 prebid-server

Data integration

Prebid Server has three primary data objects that it needs to manage:

• Accounts represent publishers, and are used for metrics aggregation and terms of service adherence. Requests without an active account will be rejected.
• Domains are compared to the HTTP Referer header; all unknown/unapproved domains will be rejected.
• Bundles are compared to the app.bundle value; all unknown/unapproved bundles will be rejected.
• Configs are used for server-side configuration of adapters, primarily for use with mobile apps where managing configs client-side is ineffective.

Up Next

• Limit adapters to one bid per ad unit
• NURL support
• Think through how deals work
• Video
• Native