Why you should take a look at traefik, even if you don't use containers

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2024-05-05 12:00:04

Traefik got really popular over the last few years in the bubble of home-lab youtubers, that’s when I first heard about it.

Traefik is more comparable to HAProxy than to nginx/caddy/apache2 - it forwards requests to services and returns the responses, can even modify headers and other aspects of the request and response, but it can’t serve files.

Traefiks site states their mission to help the microservices world. All these youtubers share that they own some kind of container infrastructure, either docker or kubernetes. Traefik runs as container too, you mount the docker socket into the traefik container and gain the ability to auto-detect other containers that you might want to expose using traefik. You can configure the proxying behavior right on the specific container via labels. Traefik can automatically request a TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt and makes your service available as soon as it detects the existence of new container.

As I don’t use linux containers that much right now, I thought traefik wasn’t for me. But I was wrong. It’s fantastic!