Introducing BareProxy, the Reverse Proxy That Explains Itself

Most applications use a small part of nginx. They terminate TLS, route by host and path, spread requests over backends that are up, change config without dropping traffic, and sometimes need to know what happened to one request. BareProxy is a reverse proxy for that part, with a core small enough to read in an afternoon.

The whole config for a site with an API, a web front end and a www redirect is 21 lines. A newcomer can read it in five minutes, and nothing in it depends on a precedence order: rules are tried from the top, and the first match wins.

What sets BareProxy apart is that it explains itself. why tells the story of any request that already happened. explain shows how a request would be handled before it arrives. plan says which requests a config change will hand to a different place, before the change goes live.

Everything beyond the core is an add-on module: static files, compression, caching, rate limits, access checks, traffic splits and more. Each one is optional, and the core needs none of them. The platform page has the details.