Hello people, I recently rented a vps server from OVH and I want to start hosting my own piefed instance and a couple other services. I am running debian 13 with docker, and I have nginx proxy manager almost set up. I want to set up subdomains so when I do social.my.domain it will go to my piefed instance, but how do I tell the machine to send piefed traffic to this subdomain and joplin traffic (for example) to another domain? Can I use nginx/docker natively for that or do I have to install another program. Thanks for the advice.
FWIW I don’t find Apache dated at all. It’s mature software, yes, but it’s also incredibly powerful and flexible, and regularly updated and improved. It’s probably not the fastest by any benchmark, but it was never intended to be (and for self-hosting, it doesn’t need to be). It’s an “everything and the kitchen sink” web server, and I don’t think that’s always the wrong choice. Personally, I find Apache’s litlte-known and perhaps misleadingly named Managed Domains (mod_md/MDomain) by far the easiest and clearest way to automatically manage and maintain SSL certificates, it’s really nice and worth looking into if you use Apache and are using any other solution for certificate renewal.
I’ll be honest with you here, Nginx kind of ate httpd’s lunch 15 years ago, and with food reason.
It’s not that httpd is “bad”, or not useful, or anything like that. It’s that it’s not as efficient and fast.
The Apache DID try to address this awhile back, but it was too late. All the better features of nginx just kinda did httpd in IMO.
Apache is fine, it’s easy to learn, there’s a ton of docs around for it, but a massively diminished userbase, meaning less up to date information for new users to find in forums in the like.
Apache has the better open source tooling IMO.
I use both, but at work I prefer apache simply for its relative ease of setting up our SSO solution. There is probably a tool for that in nginx as well, but its either proprietary or hard to find (and I did try to find it, but setting up and learning apache and then SSO was actually easier for me).