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Why do so many people use NGINX? (infosec.pub)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Having used HAProxy for 15 years commercially, I absolutely agree with this. There are lots of complex features of HAProxy that only a dedicated proxy can provide. The acls, deep packet inspection and stick tables are a few.

Whilst it doesn’t directly “serve” PHP or Python - it’s a load balancer so can just have regular Apache or nginx backends serving content which is arguably its main use case. For homelab this doesn’t always make sense but I would pick nginx for high traffic commercial environments.