Felix' Blog - Replacing nginx with axum
For the last seven years, I've been reaching for nginx when I wanted to host something that was facing the public internet. Mostly as a reverse-proxy, but also for static sites. My webservers tend to accumulate features over time (like all software, I guess) and after a while, I have multiple services running under different subdomains, some being protected using basic auth, and of course TLS in front of everything. Roughly a year ago, I replaced my private server's nginx setup with a handwritten one using axum.
Axum is a Rust library to write web services, and I'm maintaining one at $work that is using it. I'm a big fan of axum, because it makes it incredibly easy to create webservices. Nginx is not super hard to configure, but it's also not easy. With these two evaluations in my head, it seemed like a good idea to replace nginx with a server using axum.
This way, I would only need to do a basic server setup (sshd config, fail2ban, etc.), copy the server binary onto the server, place a single service file, and call it a day.
