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 must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
And it makes it very easy to get and maintain certificates.
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.
Often I already have nginx running for serving some static content anyway.
Otherwise, I’m traefik all the way.
Because pingora doesn’t have a Nixos package yet
Some people are also building a reverse proxy using pingora called river.
Would that lack the performance benefits that pingora provides by being compiled without configuration file?
I mean pingora out performs nginx which is why cloud flare made it, I believe
IIUC pingora is not standalone, but a set of rust crates? Should be already supported by nixpkgs through rust builders.
Yep it would need to be compiled from the configuration given. I’m vaguely interested in trying. I will look up the rust builders. Thank you
This is it for me. I used to use caddy a few years ago because writing config files was a breeze. Now I “use” nginx because I can define everything in a few lines of nix and it’s configured automagically for me.
Yeah I love that about nix and I can imagine a clever package writer can make a pingora binary to mimic that configurabllity
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:
- HAProxy at the edge VPS - routes requests to machines based on SNI
- WireGuard VPN - connects my internal devices to my VPS
- Caddy in Docker - runs on internal network on my NAS/homelab - manages LetsEncrypt renewals and reverse proxies to internal Docker network
- 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.
Counter question: Why does everyone call it “engine X” and not “enjinx”, which would be the way cooler pronunciation?
I always said “in GIN icks” (gin like the alcohol) based on someone else’s pronunciation years ago. I never realized it was meant to have anything to do with “engine” as a result.
It’s actually n-jynx duh
oh I’ve only ever read it, never heard it pronounced, do people really pronounce it engine X?
That is the way it’s pronounced, yes.
I call it N Jinx. Always have and I’ll never be convinced otherwise that it’s not.
I always did? A friend pointed out to me once the “correct” pronunciation. I like this way more.
Directly from the nginx home page:
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server, originally written by Igor Sysoev.
Huh. That is way cooler
When NGINX showed up it beat the then dominant apache on resource utilzation hands-down.
It’s also very configurable and has a lot of modules, both in-house and third party.
The only downside for me: as of late the whole commercial part of the project has been gobbling up everything to shove the non-free version to the point where it’s hard to find info on the free version, e.g., the wiki page that lists all the third-party modules. The nginxtutorials site seems to be a good resource.
Btw one of the main devs forked it into freenginx:
Dounin writes in his announcement that “new non-technical management” at F5 “recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects. In particular, they decided to interfere with security policy nginx uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers’ position.” While it was “quite understandable,” given their ownership, Dounin wrote that it means he was “no longer able to control which changes are made in nginx,” hence his departure and fork.
Also, fun fact: this is probably the only instance of russian software muricans don’t cry Commie! all the time (maybe because the parent company was acquired).
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.
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 :)
Because modsec.
As a security professional, what finally got me to move from Apache to NGINX was OpenResty.
I sometimes still put Apache behind it, depending on my goals.
Caddy’s developer gives me the ick. He’s way too pompous in PRs on GH. nginx is just a constant – it does exactly what you need to and does it well.
I use nginx & docker-proxy. Because the model I copied used that setup. Having messed with it a bit, I’m understanding it more and more. Before that, the last time I messed with a web server (Apache), nginx wasn’t around. Lately, I’ve seen a similar docker setup to mine that doesn’t use docker-proxy. If I find time, I’ll probably play with that some on my dev rig.
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.
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
