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udon ,

Counter question: Why does everyone call it “engine X” and not “enjinx”, which would be the way cooler pronunciation?

rothaine ,

Huh. That is way cooler

MangoPenguin ,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

brygphilomena ,

I learned nginx when I was hosting websites. I had it set up and running when it was time to add reverse proxies into my setup. It didn’t take much more from the virtual hosts I was already using.

Now, I don’t host many individual sites anymore and haproxy has a plugin on my firewall for the handful of services I run now.

Codilingus ,

Traefik + CrowdSec + Authelia ftw

s38b35M5 ,
@s38b35M5@lemmy.world avatar

I’m reminded of this blog/article on Ars about ripping out OLS and reverting to NGINX. There’s some good info there, and also links to other of his posts on the subject and references. Good read.

atzanteol ,

Nginx scales better than Apache does for static content and proxying, so it started to take over market share.

A home gamer handling a handful of users is unlikely to ever notice a difference.

But the configuration for nginx is simpler nout of the box for most things which is probably the real reason people use it at home.

lemann ,

I was coming from Lighttpd which at the time had a very similar config syntax to Nginx. It was pretty much a no brainer, considering I wanted to shift to an automated Letsencrypt renewal process at the same time.

Sadly I wrote some python web services for CGI (not django/flask) that cannot be run anymore, since NGINX only supports FCGI, rather than just CGI as far as I can tell

2xsaiko ,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

fcgiwrap is what you want for CGI in nginx.

lemann ,

First time hearing of this! Thank you 😁

rglullis ,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

**

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TheBigBrother , (edited )

You want to access your server under CG-NAT from the outside or what is the point??

Findmysec OP ,

You can do that with Wireguard and NAT.

Max_P ,
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

NGINX can really do a lot of things out of the box while being pretty easy to configure. NGINX can serve static files, it can proxy emails, it can do FastCGI, it can do UWSGI, it can do HTTP proxying, you can run Lua code inside NGINX to do things, there’s a module for RTMP live streaming. You can also implement some stuff like external authentication to protect your services/authenticate them at the proxy level. It can also do caching. Not all that useful with all those Rust and Go apps with their own built-in web server but if you run large legacy apps at scale it’s great, you can offload a lot of stuff away from your slow ass PHP app.

Caddy’s simpler but the current battle tested popular option is NGINX.

HAproxy is good at what it does but it’s only good at proxying and simple rules. For the most part, it’s used as a load balancer and router and doesn’t really process the requests itself. It can alter some things in it but it’s limited, and it only does HTTP and TCP. So you can’t really run PHP or Python or Ruby or whatever applications directly behind HAproxy. That makes NGINX a better choice there because NGINX deals with HTTP and only passes the request details to the application which doesn’t have to do HTTP on its own. I usually see HAproxy load balancing to NGINX hosts with some PHP/Python/Ruby app behind them.

Apache is old. It’s gotten better but the way it works just doesn’t reflect most modern use cases. I remember when NGINX popped off like 15 years ago and just how much more resource efficient it was and how happy I was with the upgrade. So it exists and still works but not very popular anymore. It’s a bit easier to set up but also a bit weird with things like mod_php which runs directly inside Apache instead of a dedicated user that can be better sandboxed.

Traefik is getting traction in big part because it fits well with the Docker ecosystem and just sets itself up automatically.

There’s also Envoy if you want some serious proxying and meshing but setting that one up is truely headache inducing.

They’re all pretty good web servers regardless, it comes down to preference. There’s no right choice because everyone’s needs are different.

db0 ,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Not sure why you say haproxy can’t serve python. I do it all the time. You just use something like python waitress and then point haproxy to it’s port.

Max_P ,
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

It depends on what you use on the Python side. Classically that would have been uWSGI or one of the *SGI interfaces, and lately ASGI.

Sure, one can totally make Python apps that serve HTTP directly. The same can be done with PHP (and Ruby and others) as well, but most people still run their PHP through PHP-FPM over FastCGI because you can offload a lot of the work to the much faster NGINX side. A fair amount of apps make use of X-Accel-Redirect to serve private files, so you don’t tie up a PHP worker for an hour serving the user’s 2GB file.

But yes, as those languages all move to async computing and away from worker pools, it’s more common to see those serve HTTP directly, and there’s less and less need for a proxy that supports those other protocols. The async event loop is what made NGINX special when it came out, so naturally languages that moves to that model greatly reduce the need for that as well, they too can easily handle thousands of concurrent connections no problems. Plus these days people slap a CDN in front anyway so static file performance doesn’t matter quite as much.

db0 ,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Ye pretty much. I was just quite astounded at that statement as the AI Horde is basically just a lot of python processes behind a very low powered haproxy server.

Personally, I understand people like to stay with the familiar, which is perfectly fine for a non-demanding service, but when something becomes demanding, I find the haproxy specialization serves better. I wish lemmy deployment by default utilized haproxy myself.

d2k1 ,

HAproxy is good at what it does but it’s only good at proxying and simple rules. For the most part, it’s used as a load balancer and router and doesn’t really process the requests itself.

To add something here: HAProxy’s ACLs are more powerful than anything nginx, Apache or even Envoy can do. Of course HAProxy is not a web server but “just” a reverse proxy that speaks HTTP (and TCP) but what you can do with its ACLs is often extremely impressive in its simplicity and elegance. A single-line ACL in HAProxy would require loading additional modules in nginx and writing a screenful of configuration directives. Though the average self-hoster will probably never need any of the power HAProxy offers.

In the past 20 years I have professionally used all four of these as web servers and/or reverse proxies and I am pretty confident that HAProxy beats all others when it comes to request processing. Though Envoy might be getting there.

Findmysec OP ,

Traefik’s marketing as the “Docker reverse-proxy” put me off since I like technologies to stay agnostic of each other (personal preference).

Your arguments are correct, and usually I’d run a separate web server but I suppose for a homelab having less things to manage is great

levitte ,
@levitte@mastodon.nu avatar

@Findmysec
Contrary to most, I never made the Apache-to-nginx switch. I actually don't find nginx that much easier to configure, so the effort of rewriting all my templates was too high.

Caddy is a different story. I can replace swathes of configuration lines with just two? And get letsencrypt automatically without having to give it a single thought? Gimme!

Findmysec OP ,

Indeed, I don’t find NGINX that easy to configure either

aurelian ,
@aurelian@lemmy.ml avatar

What about envoy proxy?

Nothing else on the market has as low latency implications to workloads that I am aware of.

Findmysec OP ,

I have heard a lot about Envoy proxy from Istio but never looked into it for baremetal usage. I’ll keep an eye out, thanks

rysiek ,
@rysiek@szmer.info avatar

HAproxy cannot serve static files directly. You need a webserver behind it for that.

Apache is slow.

Nginx is both a capable, fast reverse-proxy, and a capable, fast webserver. It can do everything HAproxy does, and what Apache does, and more.

I am not saying it is absolutely best for every use-case, but this flexibility is a large part of why I use it in my infra (nad have been using it for a decade).

miau ,

Honest question: why not use nginx?

I have run it in so many different scenarios, both professionally and personally, its crazy. Nginx has never failed me, literally. My homeserver is quite limited but nginx has a very small footprint, it performs beautifully well and it satisfies all my hosting, proxying, redirecting and streaming needs.

It works for modern and legacy applications, custom code, webhosting, supports all the modern features and its configuration is very easy with literal thousandsof examples available online.

Apache probably can do all that but I hate how unintuitive its configuration is to me personally. HAproxy cant do half the stuff nginx does.

As for caddy Ive heard of it but never really used it. What does it offer that nginx doesnt?

Flax_vert ,

Because everyone told me to

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