Help understanding Reverse Proxies

Error Lab@infosec.pub to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 5 points –

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.

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HAProxy is a reverse proxy.

As mentioned it’s a stupid question, it’s just all of this talk of Nginx got me confused that I need to have it on proxmox or everything will crumble

The purposes of reverse proxies vary.

One of the main reasons is that you want to host multiple services on the same IPv4 and port since you usually only get one IPv4 (works for IPv6 too but there getting more than one from your hoster is a lot easier). This is known as name-based virtual hosting.

Another thing that is often (but not always) handled by a reverse proxy is SSL/TLS termination. That way the actual application doesn't have to worry about the certificates or crypto-related security updates. Sometimes TLS is used again on the bit between the reverse proxy and the backend server but if they are both on the same physical machine that bit is often skipped.

There are also other services such as rate limiting, caching or fully featured Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and of course CDNs that come in reverse proxy form but you shouldn't need to worry about those too much for a small personal website that isn't used by thousands of users.

This answer says it all. A reverse proxy dispatches HTTP requests to several "backend" services (your applications), depending on what domain name is requested in the HTTP request headers. For example using Apache as a reverse proxy, a config block such as

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName  media.example.org
  ...
  ProxyPass "/" "http://127.0.0.1:8096/"
</VirtualHost>

will redirect requests made on port 443 with the HTTP header Host: media.example.org (for example a request to https://media.example.org/my/page) to the "backend" service listening on 127.0.0.1 (local machine), port 8096 (which may be a media server, a wiki, ...). This way you only have to expose ports 80/443 to the outside network, and the reverse proxy will take care of dispatching requests to the correct "backend" service.

Most web servers can be used as reverse proxies.

In addition, since all requests go through the proxy, it is a good place to manage centralized logging, SSL/TLS certificates, access control such as IP whitelisting/blacklisting, automatic redirects...

Thank you so for tolerating my question and the informative answer