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?
nginx is mature and has a lot of support online. A lot of server projects assume you’re using nginx, as well. I’ve only ever seen caddy instructions on newer projects and even then, they usually also have nginx instructions.
Plus, I already know how to use it.
You want to access your server under CG-NAT from the outside or what is the point??
Good question. I chose it initially because it was open source and way easier (in my eyes) than Apache. I don’t recall the others being an option at the time, or I was not aware of them. nginx does what I need without complaint, so I haven’t switched.
At $dayjob I switched from Apache to nginx 15+ years ago. It’s Callback/Event based process model ran circles around Apache’s pre-fork model at the time. It was very carefully developed to be secure, and even early on it had a good track record. Being able to have nginx handle static content without tying up a backend worker process was huge, and let us scale our app pretty well for the investment of time. Since then, Apache implemented threaded + Event based process models, Caddy, traefik, and a bunch of others have entered the scene.
TBH, I think the big thing nowadays is sane defaults, and better configuration, even automatically discovered configuration – traefik is my current favorite for discovering hosts in consul/Kubernetes/simple host definition files, but since traefik can’t directly serve files, I simply proxy from traefik to … nginx :)
NGINX is a bit more hands on than some other options but it’s mature, configurable and there’s a huge amount of information out there for setting it up for various use cases.
in my case, its what I set up when i was first getting into this and it works, so I don’t want to go through setting up anything else.
Nginx handles more connections than Apache, given the same resources. HAProxy does not have web server functionality like the former two, so Nginx is the natural upgrade from Apache. Caddy is relatively new, I’m not sure how it compares other than being easier to set up.
