I’ve been using NPM for a few years now and can’t recommend it enough. I use it to route to both docker containers on an internal proxy network as well at other services within my networks

Nginx installed directly, I use nano over ssh to edit configs. Forces you to learn some things and I never moved passed it because it works so well.

I’ve been using caddyserver for awhile and love it. Config is nicely readable and the defaults are very good.

In my experience, all the 3 big ones work just fine. Caddy, Traefik, Nginx. I use Nginx.

I use nginx as the internet facing proxy, write my own config and manage it with source control. Also use traefik in docker land with service labels to configure it

Nginx for my intranet because configuration is fully manual and I have complete control over it.

Caddy for the public services on my vps because it handles cert renewal automatically and most of its configuration is magic which just works.

It is unbelievable how shorter caddy configuration is, but on my intranet:

1. I don’t want my reverse proxy to dial on internet to try to fetch new SSL certs. I know it can be disabled, but this is the default.
2. I like to learn how stuff works, Nginx forces you to know more details but it is full of good documentation so it is not too painful compared to Caddy.

it seems easier to manage stuff not in docker

Read into Traefik’s dynamic configuration. Adding something outside of Docker is as easy as adding a new config file in the dynamic configuration folder. E.g. jellyfin.yml:

http:

  routers:

    jellyfin:
      rule: Host(`jellyfin.example.org`)
      entrypoints: websecure
      tls:
        certResolver: le
      service: jellyfin

  services:

    jellyfin:
      loadbalancer:
        servers:
          - url: "http://192.168.1.5:8096/"

The moment you save that file it will be active and working in Traefik.

Caddy is really simple and easy. Just werks and gives you https

I use NPM in a docker container. It could not be easier in my opinion but then again, I did not use any of the alternatives so I might be missing out on something, who knows. I did manage a couple of proxy servers in the past based on Apache and I can tell you that NPM is much easier and logical to me than that.

Just create a compose file and start it. Create DNS records pointing to your NPM IP address/exposed IP and make a host in NPM sending traffic to the right container IP:port. The compose file is super simple, could not be easier. Here’s mine for example:

services:
  nginx-proxy-manager:
    container_name: nginx-proxy-manager
    image: 'jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest'
    restart: always
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '443:443'
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt

I just make sure ports 443 and 80 are exposed on my router so DNS records can point to that IP adrdess. All traffic on port 80 gets re-routed to 443.

I’m probably stating all the obvious things here 😀

I use the caddy plugin in opnsense. Used nginx proxy manager from Proxmox helper scripts before that, which was relatively easy and helped me understand the whole proxy thing. Moved to caddy on opnsense a few months ago, just because, and have had no good reason to change yet.

freenginx

I like Zoraxy it has a lot of features, like Zerotier integration, status monitoring etc and a clean UI

Runs fine for my needs and fully replaced NPM for me 😊

You can run it in docker or as a single binary directly

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.

I’ve been using nginx forever. It works, I can do almost everything I want, even if more complex things sometimes require some contortions. I’m not sure I would pick it again if starting from scratch, but I have no problems that are worth switching for.

I use nginx for static websites and TLS passthrough servers.

I use traefik as a reverse proxy for sites with many services and SSO.

Nginx is definitely easier to configure for simple things. But I prefer traefik for more complex setups.