Looking to use WriteFreely on a production server, and am wanting to find out what the difference is between standalone and using a reverse proxy before I go ahead with one then find out I should have used the other. Highly unlikely that my instance will have anything more than my own blog and a few external links, if that makes any difference. I’ll also be using Apache instead of Nginx if the reverse proxy method is the one to go for. I’ve seen a few replies with info for Apache on here so shouldn’t have too much of a problem setting that up. I’d plan to create in-depth documentation too for this process.
The only real difference is which application handles incoming requests – either Apache/Nginx or WriteFreely. All options work well in production environments, so it really comes down to your own needs.
A benefit of running WF in standalone mode is that you’ll get better performance, since there’s no overhead from another server.
But a reverse proxy might be better if you’re running multiple applications on a server, need load balancing, or want to leverage Apache / Nginx for caching and serving static files. The sample Nginx config in our getting started guide shows some of that caching in place, and indeed we use Nginx in production for some of these reasons.
Otherwise, I’d love to know when you write that documentation! Would be a huge help.
Thanks for that explanation @matt, really appreciate it. Sounds as if standalone would do, seeing as it will no doubt be a very low traffic instance. Saying that, I can’t pass up a challenge, so I’ll try both and can fully document how I get it working on an Apache setup. I’ll make a post with it as soon as I can.