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?

  • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    There’s a lot of good resources for Nginx, it’s fast (faster than Caddy), and has a ton of features, so you can use it for pretty much anything HAProxy, Apache, or Caddy can do, and not sacrifice much in performance.

    That said, I mostly use HAProxy and Caddy. Here’s my basic setup:

    1. HAProxy at the edge VPS - routes requests to machines based on SNI
    2. WireGuard VPN - connects my internal devices to my VPS
    3. Caddy in Docker - runs on internal network on my NAS/homelab - manages LetsEncrypt renewals and reverse proxies to internal Docker network
    4. Nginx in Docker - FE for NextCloud; this simplifies things so all my TLS is handled in one place, and Caddy doesn’t need to touch files

    I use a local DNS server on my router so my domains can route directly to Caddy instead of going over the internet when on my network, otherwise I may just have HAProxy handle LetsEncrypt certificates.

    From what I can tell, Nginx is a little more efficient than Caddy, but Caddy is plenty fast for my needs. I’m considering switching from NextCloud to the new ownCloud Infinite Scale, and if I do, I’d ditch nginx completely.