NPM vs Traefik?

Traefik. It has a GUI that I can use to see things, and (depending on your setup) you define the routes and stuff as part of your container definitions, minimal extra work required, makes setup and teardown a breeze. It is also nice that you can use it in all sorts of places, I have used it as Kubernetes ingress and as the thing that routed traffic to a Nomad cluster.

I went from Apache to Nginx (manually configured, including ACME) to Traefik over the course of the past ~10 years. I tried Caddy when I was making the switch to Traefik and found it very annoying to use, too much magic in the wrong places. I have never actually used NPM, as it doesn't seem useful for what I want...

Anyway, with traefik you can write your services in docker compose like this, and traefik will just pick them up and do the right thing:

version: "3"
services:
  foo-example-com:
    image: nginx:1.24-alpine
    volumes: ['./html:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro']
    labels:
      'traefik.http.routers.foo-example-com.rule': Host(`foo.example.com`)
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - traefik
networks:
  traefik:
    name: traefik-expose-network
    external: true

It will just work most of the time, though sometimes you'll have to specify 'traefik.http.services.foo-example-com.loadbalancer.server.port': whatever or other labels according to the traefik docs if you want specific behaviors or middleware or whatever.

And your deployment of traefik would look something like this:

version: '3'
services:
  traefik:
    image: traefik:v2
    command: >-
      --accesslog=true
      --api=true
      --api.dashboard=true
      --api.debug=true
      --certificatesresolvers.le.acme.dnschallenge.provider=provider
      --certificatesresolvers.le.acme.storage=acme.json
      [ ... other ACME stuff ... ]
      --entrypoints.http.address=:80
      --entrypoints.http.http.redirections.entrypoint.to=https
      --entrypoints.http.http.redirections.entrypoint.scheme=https
      --entrypoints.https.address=:443
      --entrypoints.https.http.tls.certresolver=le
      --entrypoints.https.http.tls.domains[0].main=example.com
      --entrypoints.https.http.tls.domains[0].sans=*.example.com
      --entrypoints.https.http.tls=true
      --global.checknewversion=false
      --global.sendanonymoususage=false
      --hub=false
      --log.level=DEBUG
      --pilot.dashboard=false
      --providers.docker=true
    environment:
      [ ... stuff for your ACME provider ... ]
    ports:
      # this assumes you just want to do simple port forwarding or something
      - 80:80
      - 443:443
      # - 8080:8080 uncomment if you want to hit port 8080 of this machine for the traefik gui
    working_dir: /data
    volumes:
      - ./persist:/data
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
    networks:
      - traefik
    restart: unless-stopped
networks:
  traefik:
    name: traefik-expose-network
    external: true

Note that you'd have to create the traefik-expose-network manually for this to work, as that is how traefik will talk to your different services. You can get even fancier and set it up to expose your sites by default and auto-detect what to call them based on container name and stuff, but that is beyond the scope of a comment like this.

Technically my setup is a little more complex to allow for services on many different machines (so I don't use the built-in docker provider), and to route everything from the internet using frp using proxy protocol so I don't expose my home IP... I think this illustrates the point well regardless.