[nicbou]

Nginx is not relatively simple. It's not easy. It's an unintuitive, poorly documented minefield.

I agree with you in principle, but in practice mthese services replace dozens of hours of banging your head against software that's one misstep from blowing your legs clean off.

Sometimes, you have better things to do than tweaking nginx configs using the average of a dozen tutorials and docs that might as well be written in middle English.

I don't have better things to do, which is why I bothered. I'm not sure if it was really worth it. Cloudflare took 5 minutes to set up.

[omnibrain]

> Nginx is not relatively simple. It's not easy. It's an unintuitive, poorly documented minefield.

And that's why I use Caddy.

[heliodor]

The original point comparing nginx with services makes sense if you replace "nginx" with "caddy". Nginx is a disaster from a usability point of view.

[joshmanders]

The premise that OP states isn't that Cloudflare is easier, but that when that one misstep happens and attempts to blow your legs clean off, you at least are in control of the environment and can debug/fix what's going on.

Not so easy on these platforms.

[jefurii]

> Nginx is not relatively simple.

Sure it is, if your needs are simple and you follow a tutorial and don't just randomly spam stuff into your config files. Nginx can get really really complicated but it doesn't have to.

> mthese services replace dozens of hours of banging your head against software that's one misstep from blowing your legs clean off.

Yes, you can definitely spend hours figuring out Nginx, but you can shoot your foot off with a PAAS just as easily and at least Nginx is a technology that you can use in many different situations. It's definitely worth learning a tool like that, versus a commercial service where you play in a sandbox and they can jack up the price or change the rules at any time.

This is written as a long-time web developer and sysadmin. A lot of comments like the above seem to be written to try to scare younger devs away from standard tools and into the arms of PAAS vendors.

[nicbou]

The location resolution order, the arbitrary rule inheritance, the complete lack of useful errors, the abundance of footguns, the asinine defaults. Oh and automatic certificate renewal is still a pain. Purging the cache selectively took me a few days to set up.

Blame the user all you want, but after a decade of using nginx, I'm ready to claim that it's a pain to work with.