Introducing BareProxy, the Reverse Proxy That Explains Itself

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most applications use a small part of nginx. They terminate TLS, route by host and path, spread requests over backends that are up, change config without dropping traffic, and sometimes need to know what happened to one request. BareProxy is a reverse proxy for that part, with a core small enough to read in an afternoon.

The whole config for a site with an API, a web front end and a www redirect is 21 lines. A newcomer can read it in five minutes, and nothing in it depends on a precedence order: rules are tried from the top, and the first match wins.

One Record per Request: How BareProxy Tracing Works

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every request BareProxy handles gets a random ID, sent to the backend and back to the client in a BareProxy-Id header, and shown on every error page BareProxy writes. When someone reports a problem, they can quote it.

Every request also leaves exactly one record: one JSON line with the rule that matched, the config version that handled it, every backend tried or passed over and why, and the timings. Records go to the trace log and stay in memory for quick lookups.

Tracing on BareProxy.com

Introducing BareProxy, the Reverse Proxy That Explains Itself

One Record per Request: How BareProxy Tracing Works