What I’m using nginx for

Besides a few random side project I no longer maintain, I’ll typically use nginx as a reverse proxy for apps with their own web engine. For C# that uses kestral and this site that’s written in go that uses fiber v2, I don’t have much need for a lot of services you might typically offload onto a web server like static file serving. What I do need however, is location routing (e.g. subdomain[1-3].site.com), compression, ip restrictions, and ssl termination via letsencrypt.

What’s pingap

Cloudflare has this proxy library built in rust called pingora, pingap is built on top of pingora to provide a lot of the plumbing around configuration and process management that you’d expect in nginx. Being built in rust, pingora/pingap is blazing fast and has a few nice features like an admin web interface and automatic config reloading.

Setup

For my setup, I took these steps:

1. Install pingap from the repo’s install script onto my linux proxy server
2. Setup a configuration directory and relevant config files for my setup
3. Create a systemd service unit
4. Disable the nginx service and enable the pingap service

My configuration looked like this:

./pingap/conf/
  basic.toml -- basic process configs like threads and keepalive pool size
  certificates.toml -- my letsencrypt key setup (letsencrypt manages its own lifecycle)
  locations.toml -- configuration various web services and the domains that use them
  plugins.toml -- pingap plugins for things such as compression
  servers.https.toml -- similar to nginx servers, but combined into a single file that aggregates/enables the locations
  servers.http.toml -- same, but http
  upstreams.toml -- config info for location upstream info (the ips)

It’s a much cleaner configuration then having to symlink sites around in nginx and a lot less duplication of various configurations. Very happy so far with how it’s running. This may be my goto reverse proxy solution from here on.