Caddy all the way!

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

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.

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.

I highly recommend npm. It’s also the only one I’ve used, so please keep that in mind.

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

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

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 really like Zoraxy. Similar to NPM but it’s its own thing and I like it a lot more

I know how to use raw nginx/Caddy/traefik to do it, but I find the WebUI and all the extra features Zoraxy has to be very convenient and easy to use.

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.

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.

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

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.