this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
162 points (94.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40717 readers
517 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I see so many posts and people who run NGINX as their reverse proxy. Why though? There's HAProxy and Apache, with Caddy being a simpler option.

If you're starting from scratch, why did you pick/are you picking NGINX over the others?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 54 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It just works and it's in every distros default repo, it's pretty easy to set up and can be a webserver for static files, PHP sites, etc.. It can be a reverse proxy for HTTP(s) traffic or just forward TCP/UDP.

There's also endless documentation out there for how to do something in nginx.

HAProxy is a nightmare to use in my experience. It just feels so clunky and old.

Caddy is nice, but downloading and updating it is a pain because you need modules that aren't included in the repo version.

[–] ____@infosec.pub 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Right there with you on “just works,” as well as the simple fact that the config snippets you need are readily available - either in the repo of whatever you’re putting behind the proxy, or elsewhere on the internet.

I consistently keep in mind that it’s ultimately an RU product, of course. But since it’s open source and changes relatively infrequently, that’s mitigated to a large degree from where I sit.

Nothing against Caddy, though Apache gets heavy quickly from a maintenance standpoint, IMHO. But nginx has been my go to for many, many years per the above. It drops into oddball environments without having to rip and tear existing systems out by the roots, and it doesn’t care what’s behind it.

Ages ago, I had a Tomcat app that happened to be supported indirectly by an embedded Jetty (?) app that didn’t properly support SSL certs in a sane way on its own.

That was just fine to nginx and certbot, the little-but-important Jetty app just lived off to the side and functionally didn’t matter because with nginx and certbot, nothing else gave a crap - including the browser clients and the arcane build system that depended on that random Jetty app.

[–] baatliwala@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Nginx is owned by F5 now which is an American company so it's not RU anymore