algernon VS Nginx

Before diving into the specifics of Nginx and Traefik, let’s quickly define what a reverse proxy is. A reverse proxy sits between the client (browser or other services) and your backend services (web servers or applications). It handles incoming requests, routes them to the appropriate backend service, and forwards the response to the client. Reverse proxies are typically used for:

One of the most popular reverse proxies is nginx. Let's see how we can use it as I did in the video at the top.

When ready to go live, switch from the Flask devserver to something more production-worthy, such as Gunicorn, uWSGI, nginx, or uvicorn.

Nginx: A load balancer and reverse proxy to distribute traffic across server instances.

There are many ways that you could go about deploying your NextJS app on a VPS, such as using Dokku which allows you to deploy to your VPS using Git. I believe that it's really important to learn the basics of something before you use tools that make your life easier. This is why we'll keep things simple and straightforward, using the most basic (but still production-ready) approach to deployment. The approach I will show you just relies on a basic nginx configuration.

This guide describes how to deploy a static website to a $4 Droplet at DigitalOcean. We will be using Nginx to serve our website and Certbot to manage TLS certificates issued by Let's Encrypt. Finally, we setup GitHub Actions to automate the deployment of the website.

For teams using NGINX+PM2, moving to NGINX + HashiStack is a more robust and flexible solution—a great fit for startups looking for scalability without the complexity of Kubernetes.

NGINX