Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

j6b72.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 266 posts

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

#191

Post by timcambrant »

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 use NGINX and Traefik in prod at work, and for my personal stuff I only use NGINX. It's all just orchestrated containers, no ingress controllers or similar magic anywhere.

I agree with your comments about Traefik being finicky, and would like to add that my very basic inhouse solution to do automatic Let's Encrypt integration (that also works with other ACME compatible CAs) is ~30 lines of bash, which is ran by cron every day. It's rock solid simply by failing hard when standard return codes fail. Monitoring for failed certificate renewals is as easy as handshaking with the endpoint and parsing the NotAfter field in the OpenSSL output. I run this as part of my regular HTTP endpoint monitoring solution at it tells me if any certificate will expire within 14 days.

The absolute worst failures I've experienced is having new domains start with a self-signed certificate until I reloaded nginx manually, and that I had 2 weeks to jump in and sort out some error because a certificate renewal failed.

So at least in my experience it turns out that LE-integration isn't a strong selling point. Logging and ease of configuration is. NGINX is not perfect in those aspects either, but it is a bit more robust and well-documented at least.

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

#192

Post by mubu »

A couple weeks ago I was deciding between reverse proxies and eventually settled with Caddy because of its simplicity. However, Traefik's auto discovery of containers and referencing by labels is quite nice, but Caddy has a plugin to do the same.

I read the article but I'm still not convinced Traefik has anything over Caddy for me. Maybe someone else does and can chime in.

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

#193

Post by mubu »

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…

I share the same sentiments. I dread having to go through Ansible docs because it's so densely packed. Meanwhile Caddy's docs feel too sparse, and too many spread out tutorials. The reference isn't well thought out either imo.

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

#194

Post by ollien »

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…

Pydantic falls into this box for me. The maintainer refuses to build API reference documentation, as they feel that there should only be one source of information. It's their project, of course, but every time I need to find a method on an object, I am scouring pages of prose for it. Sometimes it's just easier to read the source.

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

#195

Post by molszanski »

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…

This is strange. I also don't like the docs but for a different reason.

I would rather have a more examples. And kinda _advanced_ and complex, rather than trivial we see in the docs.

Even though I had a working V1 configs and had a know-how about lingo / architecture like routes / services I still struggled for a day or two to properly configure a pretty simple workflows in v2 like:

* add TLS with LetsEncrypt

* configure multiple domains

* configure multiple services

* add Basic Auth for some domains

That said, more detailed and extensive docs would be much better.

I also remember finding things in github issue comments that worked as bugfix/workaround of something from the docs.

PS. For now I've moved to Caddy for simplicity and better Caddy DSL compared to yaml/label verbose config.

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

#196

Post by molszanski »

johanbcn wrote: post #75
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. Focus on those that use the product day in and day out, not solely on the "onboarding" procedure. I agree. We all would benefit by giving more exposure to documentation frameworks such as ht…

Thank you for the link <3

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

#197

Post by ajnin »

1oooqooq wrote: post #166

> “Server Name Indication” (SNI) into the trash it goes. anyone who support https everywhere and ever slightly tolerates SNI is a fool.

I don't see why you're opposing HTTPS everywhere and SNI, HTTP already had the Host header so it is not a new information leak.

It's pretty much mandatory if you intend to serve multiple domains with different certificates from the same host/proxy, which seems like a very very common use case, and there is no alternative to this right now.

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

#198

Post by nderjung »

If you're looking for an alternative way to run traefik, we support this out-of-the-box on https://kraft.cloud -- A platform dedicated to running ultra-lightweight VMs based on Dockerfiles, with millisecond cold start times (96ms for Traefik), scale-to-zero, autoscale.

Check it out in our docs: https://docs.kraft.cloud/guides/traefik/

It's also possible to start traefik and other services together using Compose files: https://docs.kraft.cloud/guides/features/compose/

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

#199

Post by aeyes »

ollien wrote: post #194
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…

Pydantic falls into this box for me. The maintainer refuses to build API reference documentation, as they feel that there should only be one source of information. It's their project, of course, but every time I need to find a method on an object, I am scouring pages of prose for it. Sometimes it's just easier to read the source.

What's missing from the existing API documentation?

https://docs.pydantic.dev/latest/api/base_model/

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

#200

Post by crabbone »

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…

Just another one for collection: conda. Especially the parts about conda-build, meta.yaml etc. There are only examples w/o any way to tell what's available. And the source code is frustratingly twisted, undocumented and all over the place. Something that makes creating conda packages an extremely frustrating experience, to the point that it's significantly easier to create archives and write the metadata by hand than to rely on conda tooling.
Post reply on HN