Introducing BareProxy, the Web Server and Reverse Proxy That Explains Itself

Most sites use a small part of nginx. They terminate TLS, serve a folder, route by host and path, spread requests over backends that are up, change config without dropping traffic, and sometimes need to know what happened to one request. BareProxy is a web server and reverse proxy for that part, with a core small enough to read in an afternoon.

The whole config for a site served from a folder, with an API behind it and a www redirect, is 18 lines. A newcomer can read it in five minutes, and nothing in it depends on a precedence order: rules are tried from the top, and the first match wins.

What sets BareProxy apart is that it explains itself. why tells the story of any request that already happened. explain shows how a request would be handled before it arrives, down to the file on disk. plan says which requests a config change will hand to a different place, before the change goes live.

Everything beyond the core is an add-on module: compression at run time, caching, rate limits, access checks, traffic splits and more. Each one is optional, and the core needs none of them. The platform page has the details.