this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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I'm willing to be the dumbest member of this community. But on the off chance anyone else doesn't understand what problem Nginx Proxy Manager solves:
Many ISPs only allow traffic on ports 80 and 443. But distinct from a website where all pages are part of a single process, separate web apps (photos, blogs, calendar, etc) are all made by different people and need their own port.
Nginx Proxy Manager can therefore be the only thing listening at ports 80/443 and then can seamlessly forward the user to the correct port using HTTPS.
Smart people: constructive critiques are welcomed.
There's a pile of reverse proxies out there, NPM is one that's built on nginx's reverse proxy mechanism that's a little opaque to configure if you aren't much for text configuration files. I do like it for quick and easy LetsEncrypt SSL cert management, and it's integration with Certbot, especially when you have LE moving to very short SSL lifetimes. This can all be done manually with cronjobs etc, but NPM is pretty low effort and works well.
Other reverse proxies that use their own engines are Traefik, Caddy and HAProxy. They each have their use cases, such as docker integration or high availability. None are as easy to use as NPM in my opinion.
Caddy has been pretty straightforward for me tbh, Let's Encrypt built in, cloudlfare integration with a mature plugin, everything else is configured with a Caddyfile that has sane defaults. Normally, exposing a service is just a few lines to add to that file. I find the lack of a web ui a positive rather than a missing feature.