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Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

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Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investing a lot of time and trying really hard is not the same as adding a lot of value. If your users don't find value in your documentation, saying "But we spent a lot of time on it!" doesn't really change anything. And, to be clear, I have no idea if the person you're responding to's criticism is valid. But I also know that your response does not negate their criticism at all.

How about submitting a PR to improve the documentation instead of complaining about it?

Customer: I can't find anything I'm looking for in your store.

Store: I spent a lot of time arranging things around in the store, if you can't find what you're looking for you can stop complaining and write signs for us.

Customer: Or I can just use your competitor who actually cares about their customers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#112

Why traefik over nginx for my modest needs, a couple docker hosts and a few dozen containers. I use https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager , would traefik provide a benefit on such a small scale?

I like traefik hot reload (among other things). Want to hide a service (the proxied app), a new route (a router in traefik terminology), a middleware (basic auth, https redirection, headers manipulation) ? Just drop the file and it gets automatically picked up, no need to reload traefik or that vhost. Truth is: I don't like nginx syntax and traefik is/was shiny :]. I went in for the LE renewal and containers, I staye…

It’s not that nice in practice. Traefik until 3.0 (which was released just a few days ago) wasn’t been able to reload TLS certificates under some circumstances: https://github.com/traefik/traefik/pull/9993

Built-in ACME support doesn’t work for me, so I still have some `systemctl restart traefik` hacks here and there.

Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#113
post #52

Traefik is pretty cool, but suffers from the same, terrible problem of Ansible: there is a lot of documentation, and a lot of words written, yet you can never find anything you need. I have used it since v1 and I routinely get lost in their docs, and get immensely frustrated. I have been using Caddy for smaller projects simply because its documentation is not as terrible (though not great by any stretch) Technical wr…

One of the problems that the yaml interpreter class of languages, or whatever you'd call them, suffer from is the fact that yaml itself is a language and tends to be more or less undocumented in the interpreter docs.

It's sort of assumed that you are going to do extremely simple tasks on very flat data structures. That doesn't tend to be the reality that most of us live in. And to really get the most out of these languages you have to understand an entire unspoken set of rules on how to use yaml. That's never really pointed out in the docs.

Additionally, there are docs for the unique settings for each module but as far as using the standard settings, additionally, its rarely clear how to operate on the data that might be returned or combined with anything mildly complex, you are given a dozen 1 stanza examples for each item like a stack of ingredients and then told to bake a cake.

I've had this experience with basically every one of the various yaml interpreter systems I've used.

After a few 100k lines of yaml I can get things done but the docs are useless other than a listing of settings.

Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#114
post #52

Traefik is pretty cool, but suffers from the same, terrible problem of Ansible: there is a lot of documentation, and a lot of words written, yet you can never find anything you need. I have used it since v1 and I routinely get lost in their docs, and get immensely frustrated. I have been using Caddy for smaller projects simply because its documentation is not as terrible (though not great by any stretch) Technical wr…

One of the problems that the yaml interpreter class of languages, or whatever you'd call them, suffer from is the fact that yaml itself is a language and tends to be more or less undocumented in the interpreter docs. It's sort of assumed that you are going to do extremely simple tasks on very flat data structures. That doesn't tend to be the reality that most of us live in. And to really get the most out of these lan…

To illustrate this point, here is how to have a multi line value in yaml: just kidding, it’s so confusing that there is a whole website to help you figure it out: https://yaml-multiline.info/

Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#115
post #52

Traefik is pretty cool, but suffers from the same, terrible problem of Ansible: there is a lot of documentation, and a lot of words written, yet you can never find anything you need. I have used it since v1 and I routinely get lost in their docs, and get immensely frustrated. I have been using Caddy for smaller projects simply because its documentation is not as terrible (though not great by any stretch) Technical wr…

This take is, at best, disingenuous, and at worst, dangerous. The Traefik maintainers and community contributors (including myself) have collectively invested hundreds of man-hours writing and improving documentation, specifically in response to feedback from users that things are hard, unintuitive, or complex. You are discounting massive amounts of unpaid labor done specifically for people like you. At this point, i…

I never used Traefik and have no opinion on it one way or the other as such. But if this is the response to some criticism of the documentation – which you can agree or disagree with, then you've done more to turn me of from Traefik than anything anyone here can write.

Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#117
post #44

Why traefik over nginx for my modest needs, a couple docker hosts and a few dozen containers. I use https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager , would traefik provide a benefit on such a small scale?

I think https://github.com/caddyserver is the best option here. Automatic handling of SSL certs, it's incredibly lightweight, and has super clear config syntax.

That’s exactly the situation I like Caddy in also.

Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investing a lot of time and trying really hard is not the same as adding a lot of value. If your users don't find value in your documentation, saying "But we spent a lot of time on it!" doesn't really change anything. And, to be clear, I have no idea if the person you're responding to's criticism is valid. But I also know that your response does not negate their criticism at all.

How about submitting a PR to improve the documentation instead of complaining about it?

I didn't use try Traefik's documentation, but the complains appear to be somewhat structural. Meaning a PR would need to possibly restructure at least part of the documentation, or add a whole section of documentation of a different type.

You can't expect someone not core to a project to just propose to restructure the whole documentation. Which may also mean changing the website.

And in any case, such overhaul coming from a "nobody" would very likely be rejected as being both too large or incomplete or not desirable.

Re-structuring needs to be pushed for by at least one person from the core team.

So yeah "Just submit a PR" in that context is not an answer, it's an excuse to avoid trying to understand the problem and actually improve the situation.

Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#119
post #98

Is it any better than HAProxy? HAProxy has served me well for at least a decade and has also been modernized for the cloud age with the runtime API that allows dynamic configuration.

All of these proxies seemed to have achieved feature parity within the last couple years.

Where they seem differ is the licensing, enterprise model, source language, and data plane model (sidecar vs no sidecar).

Re: Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers

#120
post #52

Traefik is pretty cool, but suffers from the same, terrible problem of Ansible: there is a lot of documentation, and a lot of words written, yet you can never find anything you need. I have used it since v1 and I routinely get lost in their docs, and get immensely frustrated. I have been using Caddy for smaller projects simply because its documentation is not as terrible (though not great by any stretch) Technical wr…

This was exactly my experience. It’s incredibly frustrating to search documentation only to be stuck with examples that are related, but don’t fit one’s exact situation, and don’t explain the underlying behavior.
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