Traefik Reverse Proxy Made Easy— Ultimate Guide

Step-by-step guide with configuration examples

I noticed a lot of people in the self-hosted world complain about how Traefik is hard to setup, and the documentation hard to understand. I also noticed a lot of the existing guides are not really explaining how Traefik works, but they just give configuration examples.

Here’s my approach to a Traefik guide, in an ELI5 fashion, I hope it will make you understand absolutely everything about Traefik.

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Back to the basics — What is a reverse proxy?

A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of other servers and forward requests to these servers. It can also modify them or reject them.

Let’s take Bob as an example. Bob has deployed a website on his Raspberry Pi. The IP of his Raspberry is 192.168.0.50, so his site can be accessed on this page: http://192.168.0.50:8080. Instead, he’d like to access it by typing https://mysite.imbob.com. Assuming he owns the domain “imbob.com”, he’ll be able to do this with a reverse proxy. He can even add security mechanisms to whitelist IPs or add authentication.