So, I have some idea on what a reverse proxy does and will be using nginx (with the neat proxy manager UI) for my setup.
However, I’m not completely clear what exactly I want it to do and how I cn use it to run different services on one machine. I’m especially unclear on the ports configuration … tutorials will say things like “change the listening port to xxx for that service and to port yyy for the other service”
How does this work, which ports can I use and how do I need to configure the respective services?
EDIT: thanks everybody, your replies did help me a lot! I have my basic setup now up and running using portainer + nginx + fail2ban.
A reverse proxy delegates HTTP requests to the web servers that should respond. It may also decrypt from HTTPS and/or cache them, it static content is served.
If you are using containers, the web servers running inside the containers are proxied. That means the delegation forwards the requests to the container which web server has to respond to.
This is more like an ELI35 for sys engineers…
Yeah, but you have to admit that children wouldn’t ask you what a reverse proxy is. I tried my best to write short, omitting details and in a simple language.