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?
One big thing they’re used for is sort of multiplexing port 80/443. You have one daemon listening on them, and you can have multiple domains pointing at the same IP. The reverse proxy will figure out which backend service to forward requests too.
Proxies like Caddy and I think Traefik also automatically manage SSL certificates. In many cases you could have your application server handle SSL, but usually it’s a good idea to have dedicated software for this.