After choosing the tiny BusyBox httpd server for containerised websites, I encountered third-party benchmarks suggesting NGINX was dramatically faster. Running my own A/B tests with Apache’s ab tool initially gave misleading results, which turned out to be NGINX Proxy Manager serving cached responses. With cache-busting requests, BusyBox and NGINX performed similarly over the network, so I am sticking with the 1.35MB BusyBox containers over the roughly 49MB NGINX-alpine images...
Running NGINX Proxy Manager in a Docker container breaks the usual habit of pointing proxies at 127.0.0.1, since localhost now refers to inside the container rather than the host. I explain why, cover the confusing exception of NPM’s own admin interface, and show how joining service containers to NPM’s Docker network lets the proxy reach them by container name via DNS, with no ports exposed to the host...
I take a look at using NGINX as a reverse proxy in front of self-hosted services, and at NGINX Proxy Manager, a project that adds a web GUI to the process and simplifies obtaining Let’s Encrypt certificates. I cover setup via Docker, along with a brief comparison of alternatives such as HAProxy, Caddy, and Traefik...
I walk through protecting a Node/Express app with nginx basic auth, aimed at simple utilities on public servers: firewall off the app’s port so only nginx can reach it, configure nginx to proxy requests and require htpasswd credentials, and pass the authenticated username to the app via a request header. I also cover the approach’s limitations, such as plaintext passwords without SSL, no logout mechanism, and no brute-force protection...
I cover simple steps to secure a Node.js web app exposed to the public internet on a VPS, including putting it behind an Nginx reverse proxy with basic auth, enforcing HTTPS, and using Fail2ban to automatically ban brute-force attempts. I also cover restricting ports via a cloud firewall, disabling root SSH login, using SSH keys, keeping the system updated, and basic monitoring with Uptime Kuma...
A walkthrough of how I add a new domain as a virtual host to an NGINX server already managed by Certbot, showing that rerunning certbot –nginx lets me expand the existing combined certificate to cover the new domain. I also cover migrating domains with existing Porkbun-issued certificates to the same server and folding them into the combined certificate, ending with a note on revoking the now-redundant ones...
Migrating my node.js API from a homelab VM to a VPS hits a snag: nginx, running in a Docker container, serves static files fine but returns Bad Gateway when proxying API requests. I walk through working out that localhost inside the container doesn’t reach the host, trying host.docker.internal without success, and finding the fix by checking the docker0 bridge interface, which gave 172.17.0.1 as the address to put in the nginx config...
I configure NGINX on a VPS to serve static files while forwarding /api routes to a Node.js app running on localhost. I cover a server block example with proxy_pass and the Host header, the conf.d include convention, and restarting or validating the config. This post is part of a series on my weather API, but it is self-contained...
A short walkthrough of manually renewing SSL certificates before expiry: downloading the new certificates from PorkBun, concatenating the cert and intermediate files into a fullchain with a newline between them (avoiding an issue from the previous renewal), and restarting the nginx Docker container to pick them up. Uptime Kuma and ntfy notifications confirmed the swap, leaving 84 days until the next renewal — which I still intend to automate...
In this beginner-level walkthrough, I move a static temperature text file from NGINX to a Node.js server. I introduce NGINX and reverse proxying, explain what Node and Express are, and show a short Express setup that serves the file on localhost port 3000, with deploying it left for later...
I set up SSL for a domain served by Nginx in Docker, using Let’s Encrypt certificates generated through Porkbun. I cover concatenating the certificate files, fixing a malformed PEM that broke Nginx startup, and migrating from a plain docker run command to a docker-compose setup with volume mounts and SSL config. I note that certificates expire after 90 days, with certbot suggested as a future automation fix...
