Nginx Proxy Manager

Nginx Proxy Manager puts a friendly web UI in front of NGINX reverse proxy configuration. Add proxy hosts, set up SSL with Let's Encrypt, configure redirects and access lists — all without editing nginx.conf files. It's NGINX for people who don't want to learn NGINX.

If you're self-hosting services and need a reverse proxy with zero terminal work, this is your tool. Traefik auto-discovers Docker containers and handles SSL automatically. Caddy has automatic HTTPS built in with a simpler config format. Raw NGINX gives you full control but demands config file fluency. Commercially, Cloudflare Tunnels can expose services without any reverse proxy at all.

The Docker deployment is dead simple. The web UI handles 90% of reverse proxy needs — virtual hosts, SSL certificates, stream proxying, and custom NGINX configs for edge cases.

The catch: you're adding a GUI layer on top of NGINX, which means debugging issues requires understanding both the UI abstraction AND the underlying NGINX config. Performance at high scale is the same as NGINX (good), but the management overhead of the Node.js UI adds resource usage. And if you outgrow the UI's capabilities, you'll wish you'd learned Traefik or raw NGINX from the start.