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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

#171

Post by jdub »

plantain wrote: post #66
sph wrote: 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…

My latest gripe in this category - opentelemetry. Thousands of pages. Very little about actually achieving basic common workflows.

When I started using Honeycomb, I had such a wonderful integration experience with their Beeline SDKs.

Then they transitioned to OpenTelemetry – for very good, justifiable, "good community member" reasons – and yikes, everything got so much more complicated. We ended up writing our own moral equivalent to the Beeline SDK. (And Honeycomb have followed up since with their own wrappers.)

There's so much I love about Open Source, but piles and piles of wildly generic, unopinionated code... ooft. :-)

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

#172

Post by samuell »

sph wrote: 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…

Ansible is definitely requiring constant lookup in the documentation.

I've found a pretty good workflow with using ansible-doc though, with two-three aliases that I use constantly:

    alias adl='ansible-doc --list'
    alias adls='ansible-doc --list | less -S'
    alias ad='ansible-doc'
Then I'll:

1. Use adls to quickly search (in less with vim bindings) for relevant commands,

2. Check up the docs with `ad `.

3. Almost always immediately jump to the end (`G`) to see the examples, which typically provides a direct answer to what I need.

Since authoring Ansible scripts is so dependent on the docs, I think they really should make this process work better out of the box though, providing some interface to do these lookups quicker without a lot of custom aliases.

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

#173

Post by jiehong »

mholt wrote: post #27
mkesper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caddy is at the same level as nginx/apache. It is able to do everything a web server is expected to (serving web sites, files and proxying services) plus handling LetsEncrypt automatically. It does not, afaik, do dynamic service discovery like traefik nor load balancing of TCP at the protocol layer, like e.g. haproxy. https://caddyserver.com/features

Caddy can absolutely do both of those things. - https://caddyserver.com/docs/modules/http.reverse_proxy.upst... - https://github.com/mholt/caddy-l4

caddy-l4 still shows:

     This app is very capable and flexible, but is still in development. Please expect breaking changes.
And it does not seem to be really seeing many new commits recently, so it feels pretty much "beta" at this point.

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

#174

Post by arccy »

silverquiet wrote: post #9

I use Traefik in production (with containers), and my favorite aspect of it is that the configuration is carried via the labels on containers which means I rarely if ever need to make any modifications to the Traefik config itself. I'd say the biggest con is trying to figure out how to pronounce the name - I think it's just regular traffic, but I can't help wanting to call it "trey-feek" or something like that.

apparently "traffic" https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/795

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

#175

Post by arccy »

rglullis wrote: post #102
jackweirdy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am not misunderstanding (sorry if I am) it sounds like you use the http challenge where your cert provider tries to GET your challenge file — if so, could the DNS challenge be better suited? There, you put the challenge in a TXT record value

You got it, but your solution won't work because of one detail: I can not use the DNS challenge because I am running a managed service provider, and my customers are the ones who own the domain. All I can do is ask them "please add a CNAME to my gateway", and I need to figure out everything else on my side.

ACME supports Delegated Domains for DNS01:

    _acme-challenge.customer.com IN CNAME _acme-challenge.your-automated-domain.org.

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

#176

Post by rezonant »

sph wrote: 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…

> Technical writers: documentation by example is good only for newbies skimming through. People familiar with your product need a reference and exhaustive lists, not explanation for different fields spread over 10 tutorial pages.

Well said, this extends far beyond Traefik. Far too much documentation these days is tailored for people who have never used software of it's type. This was a workable strategy during the Great Developer Boom, but that's more or less over now.

As a developer who didn't come from this Boom, I have been constantly frustrated by this trope, and I hope the changes in the industry will tip the scales back toward solid reference documentation, so that I can feel confident in deploying more of these technologies.

Putting that more general note aside, I have been a Traefik user for years and I do recommend it. But a lot of what it does is difficult to cite using solid docs.

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

#177

Post by Zizizizz »

dirkt wrote: post #164
engine_y wrote: post #72

We've been using Traefik in prod for 2 years. While I used NGINX in the past, I decided to migrate to Traefik mainly because of the automatic let's encrypt integration. I am sorry for that decision. Traefik's documentation does not make sense to me or my team. It is finicky and misbehaves without proper logging. As an example - when I want to recreate the certificates - it fails sporadically leaving prod down for an…

> I decided to migrate to Traefik mainly because of the automatic let's encrypt integration. You probably already know and maybe it didn't work for you, but there's quite a few Docker companion containers that automate let's encrypt certs for an nginx Docker container.

For example..

https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-swag

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

#178

Post by sharperguy »

rezonant wrote: post #176
sph wrote: 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…

> Technical writers: documentation by example is good only for newbies skimming through. People familiar with your product need a reference and exhaustive lists, not explanation for different fields spread over 10 tutorial pages. Well said, this extends far beyond Traefik. Far too much documentation these days is tailored for people who have never used software of it's type. This was a workable strategy during the Gr…

I've often resorted to just looking through the project on github and finding whatever source file is responsible for parsing the configuration files to figure out what each option does.

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

#179

Post by bvrmn »

vundercind wrote: post #153
mardifoufs wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience toml is worse at anything complex. It's nice as an .ini replacement but makes even yaml look sane in comparison if you want to use it for very complex or deeply nested stuff. But it wasn't designed to do that anyways

Am I alone in greatly preferring nesting in toml compared with yaml?

Did you try to convert any mid-complexity ansible role into toml? It was very interesting exercise for me and vastly conclusive.

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

#180

Post by nsteel »

joshmanders wrote: post #111
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)_/¯

Except the relationship between stores, customers and competitors all revolves around money and doesn't make sense in this context.
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