A forward and reverse proxy primer for the layman

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2021-09-25 16:00:07

Before some days I’d written an answer on HN where I explained as simply as possible how a forward and a reverse proxy is working and what is the difference between them. In this article I’m going to extend this answer a bit to make it a full post and clarify some things even more.

Forward and reverse proxies is an important concept that a lot of technical people aren’t familiar with. HTTP Proxying is a process of forwarding (HTTP ) requests from one server to the other. So when an HTTP client issues a request to the server, the request will pass through the proxy server and be forwarded to the destination server (called the origin server). This explanation is true both for forward and reverse proxying.

A forward proxy is used when an HTTP Client (i.e a browser) wants to access resources in the internet but isn’t allowed to connect directly to the public internet so instead uses the proxy.

Usually companies don’t allow unrestricted access to the internet from their internal network. Thus the internal users would need to use a proxy to access the internet. This is the concept of the forward proxy. What happens is that when an internal user want to access an internet resource (i.e www.google.com) her client (i.e browser) will ask a specific server (the proxy server) for that resource. The client needs to be configured properly with the address of the proxy server.