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tombond ,

Me personally, as a newb regarding proxy and homelab, I use nginx because it was super easy to set up (proxmox script) there were many tutorials available and it just works great. I had to debug some things and this also worked great, so just a perfect package.

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 😁

hendrik ,

It's easy to use, reliable, and doubles as a webserver so I only need one software to host my websites and also do the reverse proxying to the other webservices.

pcouy , (edited )

I’ll probably look into newer fancier options such as Caddy one day, but as far as I remember Nginx has never failed me : it’s stable, battle tested, and extremely mature. I can’t remember a single time when I’ve been affected by a breaking change (I could not even find one by searching changelogs) and the feature set makes it very versatile. Newer alternatives seem really interesting, but it seems to me they have quite frequent breaking changes and are not as feature rich.

That being said, I’d love to see side-by-side comparison of Nginx and Caddy configs (if anyone wants to translate to Caddy the Nginx caching proxy for OSM I shared earlier this week, that would make a good and useful example), as well as examples of features missing from Nginx. This may give me enough motivation to actually try Caddy :)

(edit : ad->and)

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

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

jimmy90 ,

Because pingora doesn’t have a Nixos package yet

PortugalSpaceMoon ,

IIUC pingora is not standalone, but a set of rust crates? Should be already supported by nixpkgs through rust builders.

SexualPolytope ,
@SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Some people are also building a reverse proxy using pingora called river.

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

kolorafa , (edited )

Because Nginx Proxy Manager exists.

And also because for me it started from web hosting where Apache and Nginx dominate and later because of many easy to understand example configs from the net including many “docker letsencrypt” examples.

Takahe ,

Very much became it exist. Its way simpler to do in the GUI.

Did not have to learn anything specific, and can work for things not in docker containers too, like the Nextcloud Snap.

lemmyvore ,

And it makes it very easy to get and maintain certificates.

best_username_ever ,

Back when Nginx started, Apache was the only alternative and a big pain in the ass. That’s how it became popular.

onlinepersona ,

Apache still is a pain in the ass. The only guide I found useful were from 20 years ago or so. All “modern” ones I found didn’t explain stuff, but were more like “copy paste this, now you’re done”. They never fit my usecase.

I honestly don’t know why people new to webhosting even bother with Apache when NGINX is around. It’s just so much easier.

Anti Commercial-AI license

DarkMetatron , (edited )

Because I have it in use as my main webserver, sure I could put that behind haproxy too but why? I like to keep my server setup small and easy, without unnecessary duplications. Nginx can everything that haproxy can, and more.

wjs018 ,

Some good answers in here already. It boils down to a couple points for me:

  • Back when I started selfhosting, it was either nginx or apache, and I found nginx better and easier to set up
  • All the nginx knowledge I learned years ago still works just the same as it did back then, so why potentially mess things up by switching if it all still works
  • Basically every project has an example nginx config for reference, that can’t be said about other proxies
  • It is easier to find support online for edge cases that might pop up with nginx due to the ubiquity of its use and years of history
solberg ,

I think a lot of people just haven’t heard of Caddy. Since I’ve found it I haven’t used anything else.

onlinepersona ,

It might be worth looking more deeply into. From a cursory glance, it might be usable for my usecase, but many service have configuration examples for NGINX (or Apache if they’re old). I’ve never seen caddy examples. What has your experience been with adapting those examples to caddy?

Anti Commercial-AI license

carloshr ,
@carloshr@lile.cl avatar

@selfhosted @Findmysec what is the problem with nginx? 🤔

catloaf ,

nginx has more features and flexibility than haproxy, such as being a web server. If I wanted just a pure proxy, I’d use haproxy. Apache is primarily a web server, and a pain to configure.

Personally I use Traefik. Add it to docker-compose, set up LE certs, add a few lines to each container, and it Just Works. No extra config on Traefik itself.

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