Caddy all the way!

Nginx from day one. Well documented, it works. If something doesn’t work chances are you are a quick googlefu away from the solution.

Traefik is a PITA.

Caddy all the way. If you build it with Docker support (or grab the prebuilt), you can use docker container names to reverse proxy using names instead of any IP addresses or ports. It’s nice because if the IP updates, so does caddy. All automatically.

Here’s what my caddyfile looks like;

{
        acme_dns cloudflare {key}
}

domain.dev {
        encode zstd gzip
        root * /var/www/html/domain.dev/
        php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock
        tls {
                dns cloudflare {key}
        }
}
*.domain.dev {
        encode zstd gzip
        tls {
                dns cloudflare {key}
        }
        @docker host docker.domain.dev
        handle @docker {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy {portainer}
        }
        @test host test.domain.dev
        handle @test {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:10000
        }
        @images host i.domain.dev
        handle @images {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:9002
        }
        @proxy host proxy.domain.dev
        handle @proxy {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy proxy
        }
        @portal host portal.domain.dev
        handle @portal {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy portal
        }
        @ping host ping.domain.dev
        handle @ping {
                encode zstd gzip
                respond "pong!"
        }
}

DNS hosted by cloudflare but because caddy handles ACME certs, all the subdomains automatically get SSL.

Stick with Traefik if you’ve figured it out. It’s much more powerful than NPM in my opinion. If you insist on using NPM, you might want to try NPMPlus, it has more bells and whistles and is more actively maintained.

Caddy. I started with npm but I realized it was hiding enough stuff that I wasn’t learning anything about managing networking. Caddy is super easy and has lot of sane defaults.

I’ll throw in another recommendation for Caddy. I’ve been using it for years and the few problems/feature suggestions I had got implemented by the developers pretty quickly. They’re super active on their forums and I haven’t yet run into an issue where I couldn’t either figure it out myself or with help from their community forums (usually from a dev.) They’re very friendly and won’t berate you for simple mistakes like other devs.

Caddy is the only reverse proxy I have ever managed to successfully make use of. I failed miserably with Nginix and Traefik.

Caddy has worked very well for me for several years now. It gets the SSL certificate from my domain name provider and all.

i use nginx proxy manager but im barely getting by. Theres zero useful documentation for setting up custom paths so everyone uses subdomains. I ended up buying my own domain just so i didnt feel guilty spamming freedns lmao.

I use Traefik at home. The initial setup was more complex than others but now it’s set up it’s by far the easiest to add new routes than any other I’ve tried, just by virtue of being right there in the compose/k8s files I’m already writing. Static routes are manual of course, but so are every other proxy so that’s no different, and they’re not exactly complicated (I see another comment has examples). The config files are the same markup language as your Compose/k8s files so you’re not learning a whole new syntax and having to switch languages mentally as you switch between them.

Caddy is super easy, but the fact that the Docker labels thing was a plugin is a con to me, I’d prefer it being first party. It also isn’t as performant as Traefik, higher CPU usage while also having higher latency.

As far as I’m aware, Nginx and Nginx Proxy Manager support no such thing, you have to manually write those routes every time you create a new service. Personally I think Nginxs config syntax annoying, I’m very comfortable with it now but I much prefer TOML/YAML.

Nginx Proxy Manager is a lot like Portainer. It’s useful for people who don’t want to learn Nginx and/or just want to click a few buttons. But anything complex you’re suddenly going to be thrown into the deep end.

You’ve already set up Traefik, you’ve already done the complex bit. IMO there’s no reason to change, from this point everything else is more complicated.

We use Nginx at work but are currently in the process of switching to Traefik.

I use traefik. I like it. Took a bit to understand, but it has some cool options like ssl passthrough and middlewares for basic auth.

but I’d like to give Nginx Proxy Manager a try, it seems easier to manage stuff not in docker.

NPM is pretty agnostic. If it receives a request for a specific address and port combination it just forwards the traffic to another specific address and port combination. This can be a docker container, but also can be a physical machine or any random URL.

It also has Let’s Encrypt included (but that should be a no-brainer).

I like NPM, it’s simple, but also allows for more complex configs as well if needed. I run it in its own LXC because I have other non-dockerized things that are exposed.

I’ve been mostly using Nginx Proxy Manager, but I recently set up Bunkerweb as a WAF for a couple of public services I’m hosting and I kind of like it. It does reverse proxy along with a bunch of other things (bad behavior blocking, geographic blocking, SSL cert handling, it does a lot).

Mentioning it because I didn’t see any other mention of it yet.

NPM is easy to use. Caddy sounds like something I’d like to try too now.

If you’re just going to VPN in to your home network, I’ve found caddy to be the simplest.

I am using nginx on a separate machine (VM) I have yet to try it in docker, I just have not found a reason to change it yet.

I’ve tried npm, caddy and traefik but they are always way more complicated then adding a new config file in nginx…

I feel the others add too much to the docker configs and limit what can be added to the reverse proxy. I have control of access from the nginx server, without having to change the apps configuration.

NPM is the closest to what I would like (only needing the same network in docker) if I go the docker way but for some reason it never works as it should when I configure it. So I am sticking to plain nginx.