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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

#81

Post by sureglymop »

psYchotic wrote: post #3

I'm considering moving reverse proxying to Traefik for my self-hosted stuff. Unlike the article's author, I'm running containerized workloads with Docker Compose, and currently using Caddy with the excellent caddy-docker-proxy plugin. What that gets me, currently: - Reverse proxying, with Docker labels for configuration. New workloads are picked up automatically (but I do need to attach workloads to Caddy's network b…

I use (rootless) docker compose + traefik. Precisely because for wildcard certs it was really painless. Although I use my own DNS server and use RFC2136 DDNS for the LE DNS challenge. No plugins needed, really. I have basically one ansible playbook to set all this up on a vm including templating out the compose files. Then another playbook that can remove everything from the server again (besides data/mounts). For backups I use restic with a custom script that can back up files, different dbs etc to multiple locations.

In the past I deployed k3s but I realized that was too much and too complicated for my self hosted stuff. I just want to deploy things quickly and not have to handle the certs myself.

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

#82

Post by rglullis »

For authentication, I had good luck with authentik as forward proxy.

The one thing that bothers me with traefik is that their implementation of ACME does not work if you have some sort of DNS load balancing. I had one setup with three servers responding to the same domain. It seems the first request )to start the ACME dance) would go to one server, and if the second one (with the .well-known address) is sent to a different one, it will just return a 404 and fail the whole thing. Now I either have * to delegate the certificate management to the service itself or add Caddy as a secondary proxy just to get certificate from it.

* Of course, someone smarter than me will point me to a better solution and I will be forever grateful.

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

#83

Post by lopkeny12ko »

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 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, if you can't find what you're looking for, it's on you. Maybe do a little bit of your own homework instead of throwing your hands up after 2 minutes and crying to the maintainers.

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

#84

Post by alex_lav »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #83
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 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…

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.

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

#85

Post by lopkeny12ko »

alex_lav wrote: post #84
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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

#86

Post by sureglymop »

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.

I would say the biggest con is that, if a container is not existing/running, traefik is not aware of it or its labels. Otherwise you could more easily do cool stuff like maintenance pages, bringing up containers on the first request after inactivity etc. So for me, I have been thinking about creating a plugin that is aware of where I store my compose files and can look at them instead.

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

#87

Post by jackweirdy »

rglullis wrote: post #82

For authentication, I had good luck with authentik as forward proxy. The one thing that bothers me with traefik is that their implementation of ACME does not work if you have some sort of DNS load balancing. I had one setup with three servers responding to the same domain. It seems the first request )to start the ACME dance) would go to one server, and if the second one (with the .well-known address) is sent to a dif…

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

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

#88

Post by spyspy »

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’ve always just used go’s built in reverse proxy if I need an API gateway. You can adapt it to meet any specific need, easily find libraries to do common tasks (CORS, rate limiting, retries, etc), and the best part: no configuration language. You just write go.

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

#89

Post by halJordan »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #83
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 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…

Disagree that this isnt a generic problem. And i'll take the same amount of umbrage at you calling it disingenuous. There are dual needs here. Having to read a story and take in a wholly unrelated workflow just to discover only half of the switches available to the feature im looking up is a problem.

And when there isn't just straight documenting of what's been implemented then it is an unreasonable gate to usage which limits customers to only the flows imagined by the technical writer.

Which itself breeds this sort of refusal to participate. Either the end user is ungrateful and needs to express that gratitude through silence or there's a smug moderator who's read everything and knows which paragraph of which tutorial has the answer and harangues anyone asking with a link and a "why didnt you read sentence 5 of paragraph 2 of a tutorial written 2 years and 3 major versions ago?"

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

#90

Post by linsomniac »

sph wrote: post #67
linsomniac wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not agree WRT ansible, been using it for well over 5 years and usually a google search points me right at the correct part of the documentation to answer my question. Ansible, the tool itself, can be a bit obtuse, largely IMHO because of the YAML source language, so some concepts are hard to translate into the tool, but the documentation has never bothered me. As far as "a lot of words written, can't find what you…

Alright, please link me to an exhaustive list of Jinja filters supported by Ansible out of the box. I'll wait. What you are given is https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbook_guide/playb... and you need basically to read/scan each example until you find what you need [1]. Do you call that good , especially when these are basically the only way of doing anything a little complex? That's a sure way of killing my…

As you say, Ansible's filter list does not include the base Jinja2 filters, which I guess is a difference of opinion. I feel that is preferred to reproducing the Jinja2 documentation, especially as the Jinja2 filter list is the first (non-TOC) link on the page.

Also going to disagree about "using Google is cheating". The purpose of documentation is to help me get stuff done. The Internet is not printed on dead trees, I don't want to read through a TOC or index looking for what I want when I'm searching, I want to use a search engine. I often don't want a reference, I want to quickly find how to do something. I rarely want to read about all the filters, instead I want to find the even/odd filter, or the the default or omit filter. Yes, sometimes I want to brush up on all available filters, but that's rare.

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