I have a noob question but seem overwhelmed with all the information I get about it. Basically, why do I need a reverse proxy if all my services are not public? Every guide or video for self hosting there’s always talk of a reverse proxy, have been doing it wrong?
Here’s my setup: I have proxmox running with LXC containers and VM’s for different services some have docker. I have HAProxy on PfSense with a wildcard cert. and the built-in dns resolver, and I vpn home every time I need something.
Have I be going about this the wrong way? Would I benefit from Nginx or traefik? Or is HAProxy enough? Sorry for the stupid question, I’m like a kid with a new toy and overwhelming myself.
In addition: NGINX is a webserver that can also work as a reverse proxy. That’s how It’m using it most of the time. HAProxy and NGINX will do the job nicely and don’t have too much overhead. Traefik on the other hand is an edge router and - IMHO - far more complex to configure. Especially for your usecase it’s oversized, since it also does loadbalancing and a lot of other stuff, your setup already does sufficiently well.
I don’t know, nginx gave me some really hard time… Traefik was way easier to setup, specially with my docker containers.
But that’s probably because I’m more into yaml formatting, than pure nginx syntax.
It’s just subjective, how easy or hard something is to configure :-) If traefic solves your problem and you can configure it easily: Win!